History – Page 7 – A. L. Lester

#AmReading

This week, two gay mystery romances (one in audio) and an absorbing fictionalisation of the story of the first Black women officers in the US army in WW2.

A satisfying story about a boy who disappeared fifteen years ago. Morgan can’t remember anything before he was eight and his memories of being passed from pillar to post in foster care are really messed up. Is he Sammy Calloway? Boyd was Sammy’s best friend and he doesn’t know either.

There’s angst, vulnerability and pushing people you’re falling in love with away before they can hurt you. There’s a rich backstory and cast of secondary characters and I like how some of the sub plots are left to spin themselves out in your head…you’ve got enough clues to work out what’s going on, but it’s not spoon fed to you. I recommend.

Sisters in Arms by Kaia Alderson

The story of the first Black women officers in the US army in WW2 through a fictionalised lens. An utterly absorbing story from the creation of the first Black unit in the WAAC, through recruitment, training and deployment to serving in France.

The women faced racism and sexism at every stage and came out triumphant. This book left me smiling– the two main characters are skilfully woven in among the historical figures of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion and are sympathetic, flawed and very real. Just up my historical street and a joy to read–the writing is beautiful. Plus there’s a list of source material at the back which delighted my inner historical nerd.

P. S. I Spook You by S. E. Harmon (audio)

This is already a comfort re-read for me and the audio lived up to my expectations. If you like your detectives with a side-order of sass and talking to dead people, this is definitely worthwhile, however you read it.

The narrator, Noah Michael Levine, hit the same note for the characters that I had given them in my head and I was able to go along for the ride. I often find I pick up details in the audio that I miss reading on the page and this was the case here…description of surroundings and what people are wearing that add depth and colour to the plot that I sometimes don’t absorb, as I read fast. I’m looking forward to listening to the other two in the trilogy.

That’s the lot for this time!

Women doctors in the late nineteenth century

A bit about... Women Doctors in the Late 19th Century

Sylvia Marks qualified as a doctor in 1910, which makes her a) a bit of a prodigy because I messed up my timeline and b) someone who really knew what she wanted and went for it against all sorts of prejudice.

I’ve put a shed-load of wiki links in this, because a blog post is stonkingly inadequate to cover it all; this is a very brief summary of the actions of a load of very able, determined and amazing people. For actual proper references see at the bottom of the wiki pages, they’re pretty well annotated.

Sylvia Marks’ character was originally based on stories my grandmother used to tell about a local doctor-friend of her mother’s, who’d come and visit and sit on the kitchen table with her skirts hitched up and smoke whilst they chatted. However, once I decided she needed her own book, I needed more than just that to base her on–so I went reading.

The first woman doctor in England was Elizabeth Garrett-Anderson, who along with Sophia Jex-Blake, the first women doctor in Scotland, fought long and hard for the privilege. Garrett-Anderson exploited loopholes in the articles of the Society of Apothecaries and the British Medical Association that were immediately sewn up for a couple of decades once she’d passed through and were therefore closed to Jex-Blake.

Initially getting the education was difficult and the women paid for private tuition and had to wheedle their way into practical and observation sessions with various levels of success. There was a lot of resistance–all the usual stupid stuff about women’s poor little brains overheating with facts, being sensitive creatures who should be protected from icky medical nastiness and the like. As time went on, however, the tide gradually began to turn.

Across the UK there was a growing pressure for women to be able to formally access university education. Jex-Blake eventually became one of the Edinburgh Seven, the first women to ever be admitted to university courses in the United Kingdom in 1869. However, although the Edinburgh Seven joined the university as undergraduates they were not allowed to qualify as doctors. They scattered across Europe and most qualified in either Paris and Berne to get their M. Ds..

Finally, in 1876 new legislation meant that examining bodies were able (but not forced) to consider women medical candidates and eventually, in 1877, legislation was finally passed to enable women across the UK to be awarded degrees.

After qualifying through her loop-hole, Garrett-Anderson founded The London School of Medicine for Women (1874), along with Jex-Blake and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in the USA to qualify as a doctor. Jex-Blake also set up The Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women (1886). It sounds as if she wasn’t a people-person–she fell out with some of her students and one of them, Elsie Inglis, left her school and founded the Edinburgh College of Medicine for Women (1889).

These handful of women who pushed and pushed through the patriarchal mid-nineteenth century education structures forced a path for other women to follow. They were proactive in lifting up their peers and those that came behind them. However, despite all this, women doctors were pretty much confined to treating women and children and not accepted in general hospital practice. Many of them were active women’s suffragists and when war broke out in Europe in 1914 they saw it as an opportunity to show that women could serve and be useful alongside men.

Inglis, who sounds like a truly amazing person, founded the Scottish Womens Hospitals for Foreign Service in 1914, where I made Sylvia do her war-work. Louisa Garrett-Anderson initially went to Europe to set up a hospital in Paris, which impressed the military authorities so much she was invited to come back to London and set up the Endell Street Military Hospital along with her partner Flora Murray. Sylvia is a sort of composite of these amazing people–not forgetting Dr Frances Ivens, who commanded the hospital at Royaumont.

The tenacity, the dedication to both professional and personal development and the willingness to engage in public life to lift other women up is very evident when you read about all these people. It must have been a truly exhausting struggle for them. I am really pleased to be able to bring them to people’s notice again a century and more later, even in a terribly fictionalised way.

Ellie Thomas: Elizabethan Theatre

Ellie Thomas is here to talk about Elizabethan Theatre and her new release, Stage Struck.

Thank you so much, Ally, for having me as your guest today! I’m Ellie Thomas, and I write Historical Gay Romance. In this blog, I’ll be chatting about my latest story with JMS Books, released on August 21st. It’s a Hot Flash entitled Stage Struck.

As the Elizabeth Theatre Scene in London is one of my favourite periods of history, writing a story with that backdrop was sheer self-indulgence!

Although there were travelling players and makeshift theatres during Tudor times, it was only during the later years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign (1558 – 1603) that purpose-built theatres were established in London. And demand for this type of entertainment was very high.

Literary historians have compared the actors and writers of the era to the Hollywood movie machine in the 1930s due to the sheer volume of plays produced and performed. Also, by the 1590s, some theatres were outside the city walls in the lawless suburb of Southwark. So there has been academic comparison to the New York rap scene in the 1990s, given the element of edgy danger.

I have to admit, the research wasn’t exactly onerous for this one. I happily scanned my bookshelves to find my three favourite books on the era and sat outside in the garden to re-read them.

To check Elizabethan clothing, meals and customs, I consulted How to be a Tudor by the inspiring “method historian” Ruth Goodman, who has spent most of her career as a historical researcher living as a 16th-century citizen. This makes her writing not only meticulously knowledgeable but full of enthusiasm.

As I couldn’t quite remember how much it cost to enter a theatre or rent a cushion for those hard oak benches in the upper galleries, that was the perfect excuse to consult Rebuilding Shakespeare’s Globe by Andrew Gurr. This remarkable book is a wonderful guide by the architectural historians engaged in excavating the original Globe theatre. They aimed to reconstruct Shakespeare’s playhouse on London’s Southbank, completed in the 1990s. So the book has fantastic illustrations that bring the Elizabethan theatre-going experience to life.

Finally, from my over-stuffed bookshelves, I could pick one of my very favourite books, Roaring Boys by Judith Cook. It is a fascinating and hugely entertaining insight into the writers, actors and managers of the London theatres of that time.

Whenever I have a student in their early teens who is utterly baffled by their first reading of Shakespeare in English class, this is my go-to resource. The Prologue has a colourful description of the bustling streets of Southwark in the 1590s. It begins with a depiction of the playwright Robert Greene, strutting along Bankside. He wears a doublet in the trendsetting colour of “goose turd green,” and sports a fashionable pointed beard. Despite his swagger, Cook portrays him trying to avoid bumping into Phillip Henslowe, manager of The Rose Theatre. Greene has tricked him into paying a sum for a play he promised was entirely new. As it’s already been performed, this explains the avoidance tactics. By the time I’ve read this vibrant extract out loud, then shown the student the drawings of a packed house at the original theatre in Rebuilding Shakespeare’s Globe, they are hooked!

In terms of characters for this story, it was easy to imagine a stage-struck Londoner in Stephen, using his spare time away from his humdrum work as a clerk to cross the river for the excitements of Southwark and lose himself in a play. As the major actors were the equivalent of movie stars today, and beyond the aspirations of ordinary folk, it made sense to make his love interest, Ioan, a jobbing player and a newcomer to London and the theatre scene.

Ioan might be handsome and dashing but is attracted by Stephen’s genuine sincerity and steadiness. In this way, I wanted to focus on the growing connection between two young men who are slightly adrift until they find each other. It was such a joy to have the lively, rollicking, and sometimes risky background of the theatres of Southwark to contrast with the sweetness of soul mates as my two heroes meet and fall in love.

Stage Struck

As a humble scribe living out a humdrum existence in the City of London in Elizabethan times, Stephen finds his escape across the river amongst the crowds of the teeming theatres where he is transported by the spectacle.

But poetry isn’t everything. When a young Welsh actor called Ioan catches his eye, he’s tempted to overcome his shyness and make his acquaintance. Is Stephen out of his depth in this colourful world with its undertones of danger? Or might there be a slim chance that Ioan can return his feelings?

Preorder Stage Struck from JMS Books

Extract

“That’s my cousin Beth,” Ioan said in explanation. “I stay here with her and her husband, William.” He grinned. “I came to London to help out when William fell off a ladder and broke his leg and an extra pair of hands was needed urgently. Quite a few players drink here and I got to know them. Once Will had recovered, rather than going home, I got my chance to act.”

“How did that happen?” Stephen asked, intrigued.

“Oh, the usual thing,” Ioan said laconically. “One of the bit-players was in a drunken brawl and got himself stabbed. Not in here, thank the Good Lord,” he added quickly, “and not fatally either. The Lord Admiral’s Men needed a hasty replacement and since I was in the habit of hanging around backstage at The Rose when I wasn’t needed here, I had a good idea of what to do. So I got hired on the spot by Mr. Henslowe. Not that I have to say much, just get on and off the stage at the right time,” he added modestly.

“That sounds exciting,” said Stephen, wistfully.

“Beats helping my father sell leather goods in Abergavenny,” laughed Ioan. “I’ve had some good fortune, so I’m making the best of it while I can. What about you? What do you do?” He asked with genuine interest.

“Oh, I’m just a scribe,” Stephen said dismissively.

Those dark eyebrows raised, “Skilled work,” Ioan commented as if impressed. “Copyists are always needed.”

“I’m only a scrivener and not even apprenticed to a notary as yet,” Stephen explained, “although I hope to be, and then eventually be promoted as a notary in time, with luck.”

Ioan smiled, “A man with ambition.”

“A man with not enough coin to fulfil his ambitions,” Stephen said, grinning, starting to relax.

As Ioan opened his mouth to remark further, both men heard his name called across the crowded room and turned to see Beth beckoning.

“Time to earn my keep,” Ioan said with a rueful grin. As he rose, Stephen started to gulp down his ale, swallowing his regret that they could not talk further. He was surprised when Ioan laid a hand on his arm. “Don’t rush, unless you have to? The food’s good here and I can join you for supper later.”

Stephen looked up at him in surprise and saw warmth and a hint of promise in those dark brown eyes. “I can stay,” he said almost hoarsely and was awarded a dazzling grin.

Preorder Stage Struck from JMS Books

About Ellie

Ellie Thomas lives by the sea. She comes from a teaching background and goes for long seaside walks where she daydreams about history. She is a voracious reader especially about anything historical. She mainly writes historical gay romance.

Ellie also writes historical erotic romance as L. E. Thomas.

Find Ellie on Facebook : Ellie’s Website

The Fog of War, out today!

And…we’re off! The Fog of War is live today! I am so grateful to everyone who has reviewed and let me drop in to their blogs with posts and such-like. It’s a sapphic, historical, paranormal, romantic mystery set in rural England in 1920.

To celebrate today, I’m hosting a party at the Lester Towers facebook group with lots of friends dropping in to say hi and offer giveaways.

I’ve also got a Rafflecopter draw running from the 13th-17th of August with a chance to win a $10 Amazon gift-card if you fancy throwing your hat into the ring.

Finally, I’m doing a bit of a blog-tour talking about the characters, settings and the history behind it and you’ll be able to find the other posts listed on my website as they come out this week. I’ve already visited Anne Barwell’s blog to talk about the village of Bradfield, Elizabeth Noble’s blog to talk about where I’d go if I could time travel and The Sapphic Bookclub to talk about the women-led hospitals in WW1.

The Fog of War

Publisher: JMS Books LLC
Editor: Lourenza Adlem
Release date: 14 Aug 2014
Word Count: 50,000 words
Genre: Sapphic, found-family, historical, paranormal romantic mystery set in 1920s England.
Content Warning: Mention of domestic violence.

The quiet village of Bradfield should offer Dr Sylvia Marks the refuge she seeks when she returns home from her time in a field hospital in France in 1918. However, she is still haunted by the disappearance of her ambulance-driver lover two years previously ,and settling down as a village doctor is more difficult than she realised it would be after the excitement of front-line medicine. Then curious events at a local farm, mysterious lights and a hallucinating patient’s strange illness make her revisit her assessment of Anna’s death on the battlefield.

Lucille Hall-Bridges is at a loose end now her nursing work is finished. She felt useful as a nurse and now she really doesn’t know what to do with her life. She hopes going to stay with her friend Sylvia for a while will help her find a way forward. And if that involves staying at Bradfield with Sylvia…then that’s fine with her.

Will the arrival of Lucy at Bradfield be the catalyst that allows both women to lay their wartime stresses to rest? Can Sylvia move on from her love affair with Anna and find happiness with Lucy, or is she still too entwined in the unresolved endings of the past?

The first in the Bradfield trilogy, set in the Border Magic universe.

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Excerpt

It was a beautiful late August day when Sylvia motored down to Taunton to collect Lucy from the railway station. The sun shone through the trees as she followed the lane down the hill from the village and the sky above was a beautiful summer blue. She had left the all-weather hood of the Austin down and wore a scarf and gloves against the wind, topping her trouser outfit off with her new hat, which she pinned firmly to the neat coil of her long hair.

Walter had watched her fussing with her appearance in the hall mirror, stuffing his pipe. “Are you sweet on her?” he asked, somewhat acerbically.

“It’ll be cold with the hood down,” she said, crushingly.

“Yes, yes, so it will be.” He turned his attention back to his tobacco, face straight. “Be careful on the bends.”

“I will,” she said. “She’s a beast to drive, smooth on the straights and handles well on the corners, but I’ve no desire to end up in the ditch.”

The Fog of War. Historical, paranormal, 1920s England

She’d bought the big Austin coupe late last winter when she’d got fed up riding her motorcycle out to some of the more remote houses she was called to in the dreadful weather. It was huge, far bigger than she needed really, although the back seat was useful to transport a patient if she had to. She still preferred her ‘cycle, but it wasn’t exactly suitable as a doctor’s vehicle. Not very staid at all. The Austin wasn’t very staid either, in that it was huge and expensive; but one of the benefits of a private income was that she could afford it; and so why not be comfortable?

She pondered all this and more on the drive down to Taunton, mind floating along with no real purpose. She loved to drive and for some reason it calmed her thoughts and allowed them to drift.

It would be lovely to see Lucy again. As Walt had said, she was a sweet little thing. Although Sylvia didn’t want to revisit the grim minutiae of some of the worst times at Royaumont, it would be lovely to reminisce about some of their happier moments of camaraderie. It had been four years of extreme stress and grim terror lightened with moments of laughter and fun. Working with a team of competent women all pulling together for one purpose had been extraordinary. She’d never experienced anything like it before and she doubted she would again. She was delighted some of the staff had set up a regular newsletter so they could all stay connected.

And so what if Lucy was sweet on her. Sylvia wasn’t interested in that kind of complication anymore. She didn’t want to cause gossip in the village for a start…although she supposed people wouldn’t make any assumptions about two women living together these days after so many men hadn’t come home from France. But anyway, even if it wouldn’t cause gossip, she didn’t think about Lucy like that. And she doubted Lucy thought about Sylvia like that, despite Walter’s teasing. He was stirring the pot a little to see what bubbled up, that was all.

Those musings took her to the station.

The train was on time and was just pulling in as she got out of the car. She walked out onto the platform as the smoke was clearing and through the clouds, she made out Lucy.

She was beside the guard’s van, directing the guard and porters to what seemed like an unnecessarily large pile of luggage. Despite the clement August weather, she was wearing an extremely smart velvet coat with a fur collar over a beautiful travelling suit that hung to mid calf, topped with an extraordinary confection of a hat.

She looked competent and sophisticated and exceptionally beautiful. Not at all the slightly scapegrace young person of 1916 who had persuaded the hospital powers-that-be she was a suitable candidate for France, although she’d been only twenty-one and inexperienced as a nurse.

Well. Gosh.

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The difference between writing in the 1920s and 1970s. And a bit about colonialism in historical romance.

With The Fog of War coming out in August I thought it might be interesting to blog about the differences between writing in all the different time-periods I seem to dip in to. I went straight from writing The Flowers of Time, set in in India in the 1780s to Taking Stock in England in 1970. It was a bit of a mind-jump.

Firstly, the main difference between writing Taking Stock in the 1970s and my books before that point, was that there was no magic. Up ’til then, I’d written in the 1920s and the 1780s with a with a paranormal twist. My magical world lies underneath the real one and I try to be as accurate as possible with that. But by education I’m a medievalist focusing on Britain, so the intricate historical detail of the 1970s was all new to me when I began.

For the 1920s books, I took inspiration from family stories about living in the East End of London in the first part of the twentieth century and there was a lot of documentary stuff to read. I’m a Dorothy L. Sayers fan, too, so it was quite easy to get a 1920s murder investigation vibe going.

Initially The Flowers of Time was supposed to be in the 1920s, too—it would have worked much better with plucky lady plant collectors toddling off around the world on behalf of Kew Gardens at that point in time and I already had a universe they could have slotted in to. However as I began writing, the characters got really bolshy and insisted they were from an earlier time period and we ended up in the 1780s. This is one of the disadvantages of discovery writing. Things can take a corkscrew turn quite quickly.

The bolshy characters made a lot of reading for me, as not only was the geographical area very new to me but the history was as well. I started off reading about the East India Company from resources that were easily available to me—British historians—and then I moved on to contemporary accounts of people’s travels and finally felt I knew enough to read from Indian historians and get a proper understanding. Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire was particularly good for that. Contemporary accounts of women travellers in India the eighteenth century are very patchy and a lot of the story was based around Isabella Bird’s account of her journey across the Himalayas in the late nineteenth.

I was very conscious of not wanting my characters to be horrible colonialists–it’s one of the real risks of setting anything in British history. Everyone has some sort of connection to exploitation. Rich people trot around exploiting their empire in order to provide romantic heroines with fainting couches in pretty Georgian houses. Poor people join the army and serve in India or join the navy and collude in the slave trade. It’s easy enough to ignore all that. But does that make your main characters nice people with whom the writer and reader can empathise? Not so much, in my opinion. The Flowers of Time was hard to write for that reason and although I feel like I did a reasonable job, towards the end I felt like I maybe shouldn’t have been writing it at all because it’s basically about English people travelling through the sub-continent for fun.

I like the book because I love my characters–Jones, the non-binary academic in particular is very close to my heart. But I am very uncomfortable with the setting now and if I had given it more thought before I began to write I would probably have done it differently. On the one hand the sweeping adventures of the Kew Gardens’ plant collectors are fascinating and they were interesting to me because of my family background–my Mama used to work at the Botanical Gardens in Dublin. But on the other hand…they’re a perfect example of white people travelling all over the world ‘discovering’ things that have always been there.

I have a companion story wafting round in my head, focusing on the male secondary characters and I don’t know what I’m going to do about it. One of them is an East India Company soldier. He’s busy mapping the Himalayas and is of course, queer and a nice person. But should I be writing it in that setting? Probably not. I need to think about it some more and maybe find a different setting for the story that will still dovetail.

Anyway, after all that soul-searching with Flowers and a spell in hospital for a month to try to get a handle on the Functional Neurological Disorder–which worked very well as quiet time to write away from the family thanks!–for some reason, I decided to set Taking Stock in 1972. Firstly, this made me feel old, because I was born in 1970. Secondly, it appalled my mother, who is still cross that the second world war is being taught as history. Thirdly, it’s almost impossible to find cover art for people that gives a 1970s feel without also feeling that one is advertising a Sirdar knitting pattern. Apart from that though, it’s fine.

Map of Webber's Farm by Elin Gregory — Webber’s Farm

A lot of the farming references in Taking Stock are from my own childhood memories—the sheep dipping scenes for example—and from talking to older friends and family. I pigeon-holed a friend who worked in the City of London in the mid-1980s and extracted stock-exchange information from him, and I found a fascinating contemporary documentary on YouTube about stockbroking in the early 1960s. It was much easier to find that sense of place that I think is needed in historical fiction, because the references were all to hand. I can happily google ‘what happened in 1972’ and have a whole list of things come up that my characters would have been aware of. And the same for the 1920s really – there are millions of words written about the years immediately after the Great War and the social changes that were happening.

Those social changes make it easier to write characters who are conscious about those things and more easily sympathetic to the modern reader without ignoring all the horrendous colonialism behind British history. The 1970s are even more so, in my opinion. It’s easy to write fairy-tale historical romance stories if you ignore colonialism, social inequality and bad teeth. But if you want to do it properly, you need to take all those things into account.

Despite having a paranormal twist in most of my books, I really think of myself as writing historical romance and I take pride in getting the history right. It’s a balance though, it has to give colour and a setting without throwing the reader out of the story either with factual errors—someone one-starred my first book because I shifted the publication date of The Beautiful and the Damned back a year to fit my timeline and it clearly spoiled the whole thing for them—or with colonialist assumptions, or with making them feel they’re reading a history text-book.

As a writer it’s my job to do that and I hope I make a reasonably workmanlike job of it. I enjoy swapping between time periods, despite the dislocation that initially comes with it!

I have pages on the website with an overview of my research for The Flowers of Time and about the world of Taking Stock . You can also read all about the Border Magic universe and how the books fit together.

Category: History