Elizabeth Chadwick is, without doubt, one of the most respected, popular and widely read authors of historical fiction of the last twenty years. Her books are published in many languages and feature a host of real characters from the past whose stories are told in vivid detail. Elizabeth is acclaimed by many for the depth of her research and she regularly updates her Facebook page with a photo and snippet of information on books she uses to research the past.
Famous for titles such as "The Greatest Knight", "The Lady of the English" and "Knights of the White Castle" she is currently working on a series of novels telling the story of the most famous medieval Queen of all - Eleanor of Aquitaine. Her "Marshal" stories, telling the life of one of the most influential power-brokers of the 12th/13th Century, William Marshal, remain a firm favourite of many and she has written about William's father as well as his daughter, Mahelt.
Taking some time away from the edit of her latest work in progress, she has very kindly given me an interview and provided a prize for a giveaway!
1 – Firstly, Elizabeth I would
like to thank you for gracing my Court of Historical Fiction with
your presence. Your books are a firm favourite of mine, how did you
start writing and why choose historical fiction?
Thank you Sir Read a Lot, and thank you
for inviting me to your Court of Historical Fiction.
I began writing when I was 15 years
old, but before that I had told myself stories verbally from first
memory. I began writing after I watched a BBC TV children's
programme titled Desert Crusader and fell in love with the hero. I
suppose it began as a piece of fan fiction, but quickly developed a
life of its own. Rather like the Mary Poppins film where Mary and the
children jump into Bert's chalk pavement picture and then go and have
an adventure deeper into the picture. I might have started off with
the TV programme in mind, but the story and characters soon became
independent of the latter.
I didn't know anything about the Holy
Land in the 12th century so I had to begin researching. Since my
character’s story arc brought him back to England, I had to
research the Angevin period in northern Europe. The more I researched
the life and times, the more interested I became in the Middle Ages
and the more I wanted to write about it. Basically one fed off the
other round in a circle. I wrote eight novels before I was taken on
by a leading London literary agent, which goes to show that you need
to persevere. I would also say that those eight novels were a time of
learning my craft and the first ones were apprentice pieces, albeit
highly enjoyable to write.
2 – Your most well-known books are
about William Marshal and his family. Can you tell us how you
discovered this amazing man and how you came to write about him?
You can't study the 12th and 13th
centuries without coming across the great William Marshal. He is
involved in many of the politics and dramatic moments of the time. He
was born in the reign of King Stephen and even served him for a time
while being held hostage by him. He went on to serve Eleanor of
Aquitaine, her eldest son Henry the Young King, his father Henry II,
Richard the Lionheart, King John and Henry III. As a young man he was
a jousting champion par excellence, moving on to become a great
magnate and experienced elder statesman- and still a fine warrior.
Where ever you look if you are studying the Angevin Empire, you will
cross William Marshal's path.
I had thought about writing about him
for some time, it was just a matter of gaining the confidence to do
so. I used to lie in bed thinking ‘Someone should write about
William Marshal, and gradually came to the conclusion that it might
just have to be me! I had to persuade my publishers and my agent
that he would be a good subject to tackle. By fortuitous
circumstances, my agent had recently visited the temple church and
seen the tomb effigies of William Marshal and two of his sons, so she
was keen to find out more about them. I did some preliminary, but
detailed research, wrote a synopsis and first three chapters and sent
them up to my publisher, and found myself with a two book contract to
write about William Marshal, the books becoming The Greatest Knight
and The Scarlet Lion.
3 – As a regular follower of you
on Facebook, I love your posts which give little glimpses of your
work in progress. Your current project is based on the life of
Eleanor of Aquitaine, which is a huge undertaking. Is this a story
you have always wanted to tell?
I have wanted to write about Eleanor
for many years. She was the project waiting behind the Marshal
novels. While I was mulling the Eleanor project other novels about
her have been published, but that doesn't bother me, because everyone
tells their own version, and it is safe to say that my Eleanor will
be a very different one, while staying true to the historical record.
For example, we know from recent research that she was married at
only 13 years old, not 15 as earlier biographers thought, and that
makes a huge difference to what kind of influence she was able to
wield as Duchess of Aquitaine. People often say to me that Eleanor
was a woman ahead of her time, but that is not true. She was a woman
of her time, confined by the parameters of the social mores of the
12th century when for a woman to have power in her own right was
almost unthinkable. I am absolutely delighted that my publishers
have given me the opportunity to write a trilogy about Eleanor's
life. I was over the moon when they awarded me a three book contract
because there is a great deal waiting to be said that so far hasn't
been. I have just handed in THE SUMMER QUEEN, which covers Eleanor's
life from 1137-1154.
4 – You are releasing a set of
three books, A Place Beyond Courage, The Greatest Knight & The
Scarlet Lion, which tells the story of John FitzGilbert and his son
William Marshal. What prompted you to release them as a collection?
When are you releasing them?
It's not me personally who is releasing
them, and it's not as a collection as such. As with all fiction that
has been in print for a while, publishers tend to refresh it by
changing the covers every now and then. You can see this with authors
such as Philippa Gregory today, and if you look back at the works of
Anya Seton and Dorothy Dunnett you will observe the same trend.
Having said that, the original A Place Beyond Courage in the UK was
given the cover of a woman with a sweeping turquoise sleeve when it
actual fact the story is about William Marshal's charismatic father.
I was never over the moon about this cover, and my UK publishers
decided to repackage the first three Marshal covers to feature men.
The Greatest Knight has always had a man on the front cover and has
always been my biggest bestseller because it attracted a male as well
as female audience. Sometimes men can be a bit reluctant to pick up
books featuring headless woman in nice dresses! So the packaging of
the Marshal novels with men on the front is to see what an effect it
has on the market. I love the new covers and I think they reflect
what the novels are about and will help to diversify my audience.
The repackage covers will be available in the UK from early
September, although you may see a few floating about just before
then, and the sourcebooks USA version of A Place Beyond Courage will
be available from September 1st - again early copies may
be spotted in the wild!
5 – You use a special form of
research called “Akashic Records”, how did you discover this
insight and how has it helped you in your writing.
The “Akashic Records” is a handle
my friend Alison King uses to describe her wonderful and
extraordinary ability to see back into the past. Given a name a date
and place or similar coordinates, she can tune into what went before
and it plays for her a bit like a film but with every sensory detail
involved as well as feelings and emotions. She doesn’t just get
visuals, but smells and tastes too, which can be a bit of a double
edged sword!
Alison had been working with clients for some time as a therapist, helping them with issues in their daily lives. Sometimes those issues would involve events of 20 years ago and sometimes the people concerned with those issues had passed on. Alison found that she could tune in to the time that the issues were occurring and also to the person with whom her client was involved even if they were no longer living. Clients told her that she was picking up on that person exactly, She reasoned that if she could do it 20 years why not any time in history?
I have known Alison for over 20 years
as a friend. We met up one day for a chat and she asked me how the
writing of The Greatest Knight was coming along. I said not too
badly, but I was having difficulty finding anything about William
Marshal's brother’s mistress. Alison offered to tune in and see if
she could find her, and came across a lady swinging a bag on a
string. Alison wondered if she was drying lettuce - that's how much
she knew about the Middle Ages! I suggested that it might be hawking
lure. To cut a long story short, the detail that came through in a
small moment over coffee and biscuits, convinced me that this was a
terrific resource to help me write the novels, and we set it up on a
professional basis. Once a fortnight I go to Alison's house with a
list of questions -she never knows what I am going to ask in advance.
She tunes in to the historical moment and finds out what I want to
know – if she can. I transcribe the digital recordings of our
sessions and send them to a mediaeval historian for comment. I am
told that it is medieval mindset through and through.
I accept taht many people are not
comfortable with this aspect as a part of historical research, and
consider it tosh, but that's fine. All they need do is take it as
another strand of imagination, because the things I am finding out
would be down to imagination anyway. I've been using the Akashic
Records since 2004 and with the amount of material I have amassed I
am convinced there is more to it than that, and it is a kind of time
travel, but that's my personal opinion. In interviews like this I
tell people what I do and then it's up to them whether they take it
on board or not.
This is a description of William
Marshal from the second Akashic session we ever did.
1168
I asked Alison to find William
Marshal in Poitou in 1168 when he would be serving as a young hearth
knight of about 21 years old in the retinue of his Uncle Patrick,
Earl of Salisbury and governor of Poitou.
Alison: He has
incredible courage. He’s like a bouncy castle; very buoyant. He’s
riding with a lot of highborn people. He’s awed by them but not
overawed. He feels as if he’s in the right place. He has a good
sense of his own worth. He’s very flexible and alert, responds not
just in a chit-chat way but deeply and appropriately. He knows how
to say the right thing at the right time and it comes easily to him.
He’s alert and all his senses are awakened. He has dark hair, long
cheeks, a strong nose. His clothes are intricate. His eyes look
dark but inside they feel light. I am seeing the youth and the older
man mingled. It is difficult for others to gauge what he’s
thinking. He has very dark eyes; might be brown, might be blue.
There is a woman
laughing and William is making her laugh by telling her jokes about
the English being loutish and stupid. It’s probably Poitiers they
are going to. The woman is Eleanor of Aquitaine. (Alison had several
stabs at saying Poitiers, unprompted by me. She was unsure how to
pronounce it, but got it in the end)
6 – Have you ever discovered a
character in your research that you detested but had to include in
your stories?
I don’ think I have ever detested a
character. There are some I would rather not spend time with should
it be possible to meet them in real life but even so they must have
had moments when they were less detestable than others, or
interesting facets to their personality I am not a fan of King John,
although of course this may come from the fact that the characters I
write about are not fans either! He deprived Fulke FitzWarin of his
lands, selling them to someone else for half the price just to spite
Fulke. He took William Marshal's sons hostage and fomented war in
Ireland behind William’s back, threatening William's pregnant wife.
Later on he took William Marshal's grandson hostage and seized
Framlingham Castle. Generally speaking my characters had strong
reason to dislike him. William Marshal, a man of great diplomacy,
abandoned that diplomacy on his deathbed to tell John's son the young
Henry III,that if he ever acted like some wicked ancestor, he wished
him an early death. I have never warmed to King Stephen's eldest son
Eustace, but I still can't say I detest him. Quite often the less
agreeable characters with their different sets of complexities are
just as interesting to write as the heroes and heroines. In THE
SUMMER QUEEN, the first of my Eleanor novels, I found Louis VII and
one of his courtiers Thierry de Galeran two of the latter type. You’d
avoid them like the plague in the flesh, but to write about they are
fascinating.
7 – What advice could you give to
an aspiring author?
First and foremost write because you
love writing. Write because you must. Enjoy exploring with your
stories and your characters. By all means learn the basic nuts and
bolts of the craft, but don't let yourself become hidebound by a
rulebook. In writing, rules are more like Captain Barbossa’s
comment in Pirates of the Caribbean. ’More like guidelines really.’
Also don't be in too much of a hurry to see your work in print.
Serve your apprenticeship. Sometimes rejection is indeed because
there is no room at the inn. Because the publisher has just taken on
a book very similar to yours. Because the agent or editor doesn't
recognise what a stunning talent you are. And sometimes it's because
your work is not ready but you don't recognise it. Learn to be a good
critic of your own work. That means finding the level you are at and
the level of readers you want to pitch it to. And my advice for
finding that out is to read widely and voraciously because it will
give you a context for where you stand.
8 – Which author inspires you?
There are many, but when I was hopeful
writer, I always read Dorothy Dunnett when trying to raise my game.
She is in a league of her own, and I love her wonderful use of
language to create scenes. I have always enjoyed the works of Sharon
Kay Penman, Bernard Cornwell and Lindsey Davis.
As a reader, my tastes are very
eclectic and I'll read gritty thrillers, historicals of all times and
genres, horror stories, paranormal, literary, you name it. It's about
entertainment, and knowledge while being entertained. I love the
work of Terry Pratchett and Stephen King. Their awareness of their
craft can’t be bettered.
9 – What is your favourite
quotation?
I don't know that I have one when you
put me on the spot! I can tell you a favourite poem that I feel is
particularly pertinent to historical novelists. It's a poignant one
by Tolkien and it's called ‘I sit beside the fire and think.’
You probably can't quote it all for copyright reasons, but I copied
and pasted it from the Internet below, and if you can only quote a
couple of lines from it in fair usage
Then I love the lines
‘in
every wood in every spring
there is a different green.’
there is a different green.’
It
pertains to my novels on Eleanor of Aquitaine. Every telling is
different even if the season is the same.
I sit beside the fire and think
of all that I have seen,
of meadow-flowers and butterflies
In summers that have been;
Of yellow leaves and gossamer
in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun
and wind upon my hair.
I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall ever see.
For still there are so many things
that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring
there is a different green.
I sit beside the fire and think
of people long ago,
and people who will see a world
that I shall never know.
But all the while I sit and think
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.
10 – At which event in history
would you like to have been a fly on the wall?
Something hugely momentous would be the
rolling away of the stone on the third day – Oh to be a fly on that
stone - that would certainly answer some questions!
I'd like to go to a proper tournament
and watch William Marshal at the height of his physical powers.
I’d also like to observe Stonehenge
being used in its heyday.
