Blog | Lucienne Boyce

My Month in Books: April 2022

The Widows of Malabar Hill, Sujata Massey (Soho Crime, 2018) The Widows of Malabar Hill is the first book in the 1920s mystery series featuring Perveen Mistry, Bombay’s first and …

People and Places: Writing with the senses, mood and atmosphere

Is there such a thing as a sense of place? Do places have atmospheres that we can sense? And how can historical novelists harness these responses in their fiction? I …

My Month in Books: March 2022

I look at two stories of twentieth-century working-class lives this month – Raymond Williams’s 1960 novel, Border Country, and Dorothy Whipple’s High Wages. Williams explore the lives of a family …

My Month in Books: February 2022

Latchkey Ladies, Marjorie Grant (Handheld Press 2022, first published 1921) The work women did during the First World War, when many moved into occupations formerly carried out by …

Spotlight On…Helen Margaret Nightingale (1883-1921)

I recently re-read Helen Margaret Nightingale’s suffrage play, A Change of Tenant. The play was often performed at meetings and fund raisers by suffrage societies, and was also produced by …

My Month in Books: January 2022

My selections for this month are two wonderful novels which, though set in very different milieus, both explore themes of marriage, family and powerlessness: Feet in Chains by Kate Roberts, …

Winifred Coombe Tennant and Whittinghame

Back in 2016 when I first started researching the life of Welsh suffragist Winifred Coombe Tennant (1874-1956) I visited the West Glamorgan archives in Swansea to look at the Coombe …

My Month in Books: December 2021

This month I’ve chosen two novels which both look at ideas about family, marriage and masculinity, though in very different settings. The pairing is accidental: when I started reading them …

My Month in Books: November 2021

This month I’m looking at two novels, one set in a very ordinary world about “a very ordinary” life, and the other in a fantasy world about far-from-ordinary people. Both …

My Month in Books: October 2021

Both of the books I’ve selected this month look at different societies – one imagined in the future, the other real and in the past. For fiction there’s Octavia Butler’s …

Spotlight on…Mabel Harriette Cross, Suffragist

Usually referred to as Mrs W C H Cross, she was born Mabel Harriette Duncan in Bristol in 1872. Her mother was Adelaide, and her father, Edward Duncan, was a …

My Month in Books: September 2021

This month it’s vampires and classicists – two groups I don’t usually mix with! – with Nicole Jarvis’s exciting historical fantasy The Lights of Prague, and Mary Beard’s autobiographical enquiry, …