Christy English

Sandra Byrd on Ladies in Waiting

Monday, October 24th, 2011 | Guest Posts, Sandra Byrd | 2 Comments

I am so happy to welcome Sandra Byrd, author of the Tudor drama TO DIE FOR as a guest today on my blog. Women have always had girlfriends, and it seems that this was no different in Tudor England than it is today. Ladies in Waiting: best friends or servants? Or a little of both? Sandra gives us a look into the privileged world of noblewomen and their ladies in waiting.

Having close friends is an important part of the female experience from girlhood through womanhood. These friends might be especially valuable when the woman’s position is exalted, public, and potentially treacherous — such friendships take on an even more important role. When Oprah Winfrey started her empire she brought along Gayle King. When Kate Middleton was preparing to become Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge her sister Pippa was her constant companion. And when Anne Boleyn went to court to stay she took her friends, too. Among them was her longtime friend, who would ultimately become her chief Lady and Mistress of Robes, Meg Wyatt.

Ladies in waiting were companions at church, at cards, at dance, and at hunt. They tended to their mistress when she was ill, or anxious and also shared in her joy and pleasures. They did not do menial tasks — there were servants for that — but they did remain in charge of important elements of the Queen’s household, for example, her jewelry and her clothing. They were gatekeepers, and during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I small bribes were often offered to her ladies for access to Her Grace. The Queen was expected to assist her maids of honor in becoming polished and finding a good match, and they were in turn to be loyal and obedient. Married women had more freedom, better rooms, and usually, closer contact with the queen.

In her excellent book, Ladies in Waiting, Anne Somerset quotes a lady-in-waiting to Queen Caroline as saying, “Courts are mysterious places … Intrigues, jealousies, heart-burnings, lies, dissimulations thrive in (courts)as mushrooms in a hot-bed.” This is exactly the kind of place where one wants to know whom one can trust. Somerset goes on to tell us that, “At a time when virtually every profession was an exclusively masculine preserve, the position of lady-in-waiting to the Queen was almost the only occupation that an upperclass Englishwoman could with propriety pursue.” Although direct control was out of their hands, the power of influence, of knowledge, of gossip, and of relationship networks was within the firm grasp of these ladies. Appointment was not only by the personal choice of the queen or the king, but a political decision as well. Queen Victoria’s first stand took place when her new Prime Minister, Robert Peel, meant to replace some of the ladies in her household to reflect the bipartisan English government and keep an even political balance. According to Maureen Waller in Sovereign Ladies, Victoria was adamant. “‘I cannot give up any of my ladies,’ she told him at their second meeting. ‘What, Ma’am!’ Peel queried, ‘Does your Majesty mean to retain them all?’ ‘All’, she replied.”

Keeping the political balance in mind was a concern during the Tudor years, too. Ladies from all of the important households were appointed to be among the Queen’s ladies, though she held her closest personal friends in closest confidence. Of course Queen Katherine of Aragon understandably preferred the ladies who had served her for most of her life right till her death. Henry told his sixth wife, Queen Katheryn Parr that she may, “choose whichever women she liked to pass the time with her in amusing manners or otherwise accompany her for her leisure.” Parr chose like-minded friends when she could. Queens often surrounded themselves with family members, hoping that they could trust in their loyalty because as the queen gained more influence, so advanced her family.

Sadly in Queen Anne Boleyn’s case, family seems to have been less than worthy of her generosity and trust. Among those thought to have betrayed her in the end were her sister-in-law, Jane Parker, Lady Rochford, and some of her Howard relatives. Among those better deserving of her friendship were the Wyatt sisters and Nan Zouche, all of whom shared Anne’s joie de vivre and reformist sympathies, and remained true friends to her till the end.

Please visit Sandra at www.sandrabyrd.com

Tags: Ladies in Waiting, Sandra Byrd, To Die For, Tudor England, Tudor Historical Fiction

Eleanor and TO BE QUEEN on Dizzy C’s Little Book Blog

Friday, August 12th, 2011 | Eleanor of Aquitaine, Guest Posts | 2 Comments

Thank you so much to Dizzy C for hosting me on her blog today. I really enjoyed exploring a few details of Eleanor’s life. As always when I write about my favorite woman of all time, I found that I had to be very strict with myself so that I did not go on too long. So here is a little piece of Eleanor’s history, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Feudal Queen. As always, any mistakes are mine. All the glory of who she was belongs to Eleanor.

http://dizzycslittlebookblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/guest-author-christy-english.html

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil: Guest Post by Sandra Byrd

Monday, August 8th, 2011 | Guest Posts, Sandra Byrd | 9 Comments

I am very excited to welcome Sandra Byrd to my blog. Sandra’s latest novel, TO DIE FOR: A NOVEL OF ANNE BOLEYN,  about life in Henry VIII’s dangerous court, will launch tomorrow, August 9th and will be in stores everywhere.  In today’s post Sandra sets the scene of her novel for us as she explores the hidden spy holes placed at Hampton Court Palace.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil: Eavesdroppers at Hampton Court Palace

by Sandra Byrd

Henry VIII had a famously acquisitive nature – and it wasn’t limited to women. The man also had a passion for real estate.   As king, he inherited many castles and palaces owned by the crown, but throughout his reign he added others by purchase, trade or payment of debt; through reclamation to the crown due to attainder; “recovering” property through the dissolution of assets formerly owned by the Roman Catholic church; and by “gift.”  A primary advisor in the early years of Henry’s sovereignty was Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, a man with tastes as extravagant as the King’s and who also had the means to indulge them. When the King saw Hampton Court Palace, Cardinal Wolsey’s sumptuous, Thames-side  property, he envied him of it.  Knowing that he was on uncertain terms with the king, Wolsey offered Hampton Court Palace to him.  Henry accepted  the generous gift but did not reinstate Wolsey in his favor.

Once he owned the palace, Henry set about remodeling. One of the most beautiful reconstructions was to the Great Hall.  The Great Hall was a large chamber where the king dined in public and where entertainments were often held. The hall, like everything else in Henry’s court, was to be well-appointed to represent his power and glory.  Historian Neville Williams claimed that masons worked round the clock for five years to complete the rebuilding of the hall to Henry’s showy satisfaction.  The room would have been overpowering to the senses,  the tastes and smells of rich foods and spices, the feel of lush wood paneling and tightly woven tapestries, the music of players, the courtly flirtations. But high above the heads of the guests, tucked into the dark corners of the roof beams, lurked one of the Great Hall’s most interesting features of all.

Photo copyright Helen Newall, http://tinyurl.com/hcpeavesdroppers

Fine embellishments had been carved into the ceiling beams, among them an HA crest for Henry and Anne Boleyn which remains to this day, but especially intriguing are the Eavesdroppers. The word eavesdropper has been in circulation since at least the 900s, coming from the old English, yfesdrype. It meant then just what it means now – someone listening to conversations in secret, watching and hearing without the permission or knowledge of the speakers.  The cherubic, courtier faces would have smiled  down upon guests, reminding all that Henry was   aware of everything at his court through courtiers and servants. Even while at play there was never a time for loose tongues among long ears, as those who spoke freely often did to perilous consequence.  At the Tudor Court, it was better to see nothing, hear nothing, and say nothing till you were in private chambers where eavesdroppers, one hoped, did not lurk.

Tags: Guest Posts, Henry VIII, Sandra Byrd, Tudor Fiction

EROMENOS and a Guest Post with Melanie McDonald

Monday, July 25th, 2011 | Guest Posts | 4 Comments

With us today is Melanie McDonald, the author of the historical novel EROMENOS. Thank you for joining us as part of your blog tour, Melanie…

I’m delighted to be a guest on A Writer’s Life: Working with the Muse, Christy English’s blog for the Historical Fiction Virtual Tour for Eromenos.

In Eromenos, my debut novel, the Greek youth Antinous of Bithynia recounts his affair with the Roman emperor Hadrian during the second century CE. Christy invited me to share what inspired me to write the novel, and also, what drew me to that particular era.

I first became fascinated by Antinous when I encountered him as a character in the novel Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar. I was struck by the way this beautiful young man was portrayed—silent as a statue in the emperor’s memories of love and loss. I learned that the character was based on an actual person: Antinous of Bithynia, a Greek youth beloved of Hadrian, had lived at the imperial court from about age twelve until around his nineteenth or twentieth birthday.

The emperor Hadrian commissioned numerous works of art to commemorate the physical beauty and athletic prowess of Antinous, many of which survive in various museums and collections around the world. Yet when I began to delve into more non-fiction works about the two of them and their relationship, I never found a single quote—not a single utterance by Antinous, nor any ideas or writings attributed to him. This silence seemed to me both sad and strange, particularly since many of those in the milieu of Hadrian’s court—philosophers, physicians, poets, architects—are quoted in historical texts almost as often as Hadrian himself.

Because so little is known about the historical Antinous, other than the facts of his origins in Bithynia in Asia Minor and his relationship with Hadrian, I felt free to create a personal history for Antinous as a fictional character. I thought I could capture him if only I found the right voice. And one day I heard it: A voice in my head that said, “I was born in Bithynia, in the town of Claudiopolis, during the reign of Trajan.” I knew then that I had found him—that voice belonged to Antinous. And just as Marguerite Yourcenar chose to use the form of a fictional memoir for Hadrian’s story, it seemed appropriate to me to also use this form for Antinous, to have the character review the events of his own brief, tumultous life via his culture’s philosophical practice of self-examination.

Another book that inspired me in the writing of Eromenos was a novel I had read a few years earlier, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, in which Rhys reimagined the mad wife in the attic from Jane Eyre and made her the protagonist of her novel. I was impressed with how Rhys turned her examination of the relationship of wife and husband into a reflection of the horrors of colonialism, which of course had gone unexamined in Charlotte Brontë’s earlier novel.

And yet another book I read while in the process of working on Eromenos was The Persian Boy by Mary Renault (and I know Christy loves Renault’s work). It’s a gorgeous novel, and I felt flattered when a reviewer mentioned it recently in connection with Eromenos. In Renault’s novel, the narrator, Bagoas, ostensibly telling his own story, paints a new portrait of Alexander the Great. That novel made me realize that in telling the story of Antinous, I must offer a new portrayal of Hadrian as well, because their two lives were enmeshed during Antinous’ life at court. But it was still Antinous’ own story—his relationship with the emperor from his own point of view, that of the less powerful and ultimately disenfranchised partner—that I wanted to examine. The character of Hadrian as portrayed in my novel is fictionalized toward that end.

As for why I felt drawn to this particular era, I’ve long been fascinated by ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian history and mythology. When I was in grade school, my father had a set of books called The Harvard Classics, about twenty or thirty volumes bound in avocado green leather with gold embossing. He gave me permission to read them, and I recall diving straight into the volume on mythology. In the seventh grade, I gave an oral report on Egyptian mummification practices for one class, and judging by the look on the teacher’s face, I suppose I went into a more graphic description of the details of the embalming process than expected. When I got older, I read Edith Hamiton’s books, and Joseph Campbell’s. I was an avid reader of science fiction, as was my brother. I still think of Ray Bradbury as a poet disguised as a science fiction writer, and think it’s a shame that genre has been looked down upon as inferior in some literary quarters.

I’m a writer who approaches writing in terms of telling a story that fascinates me, rather than writing in one genre exclusively. I also think it’s a shame that the idea of genre writing seems at times almost to have been used to try to keep writers working one narrow vein, to keep the publishers or perhaps the marketing people happy, rather than allowing the writers to explore whatever stories they wish to tell, in whatever genre or combination of genres they choose. Perhaps, too, there are those who feel uncomfortable with any ambiguity in storytelling, so they must corral each new creation into a box and try to pin a label onto it, hold it down for examination and classification. Which is a shame: you can’t pin down the ineffable, although you may destroy its unique attributes in the attempt. Or not. The best writing always transcends genre, anyway.

Many thanks for reading this guest post about Eromenos, and Christy, thank you so much again for inviting me to A Writer’s Life: Working with the Muse—it’s been a pleasure. I’d also like to offer great thanks to Amy Bruno, my tour guide for the Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tour for Eromenos.

For more information, there is a writing website, www.melaniejmcdonald.com. I also have a Facebook account, and the novel also has its own Facebook page now at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Eromenos-by-Melanie-McDonald-a-novel-about-Antinous-and-Hadrian/177668218934051#!/pages/Eromenos-by-Melanie-McDonald-a-novel-about-Antinous-and-Hadrian/177668218934051?sk=info The publisher and I are always delighted to have more people visit and “like” it!

Melanie McDonald won a 2008 Hawthornden Fellowship for Eromenos. She has an MFA in fiction from the University of Arkansas. Her work has appeared in New York Stories, Fugue, Indigenous Fiction, and online. She has pursued the study of writing in New York, Galway, Paris, and spent several months in Italy while at work on this novel. An Arkansas native, she now lives in Virginia with her husband, Kevin McDonald, author of Above the Clouds: Managing Risk in the World of Cloud Computing.

Tags: Emperor Hadrian, Guest Posts, Historical Fiction, Melanie McDonald

Upcoming Fun

Friday, July 22nd, 2011 | Guest Posts | 2 Comments

There are a lot of fun posts coming up in the next few weeks. I am excited to host Melanie McDonald on my blog next Monday, July 25. She will be talking about her debut novel EROMENOS, exploring the life of the Emperor Hadrian’s favorite, the youth Antinous.

On Wednesday, July 27, the winner of the give away for Helen Hollick’s rollicking novel, SEA WITCH will be announced.

And on Monday, August 8, Sandra Byrd will join us with a guest post titled See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil: Eavesdroppers at Hampton Court Palace.  Her novel, TO DIE FOR: A NOVEL OF ANNE BOLEYN will be available in stores on August 9th.

I am thrilled to have all these lovely authors on my site. Thank you so much, ladies, for joining us here.