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Eighteenth Century
Commemorating eighteenth-century women writers and artists in Clifton, Bristol
Clifton in Bristol has many literary connections, not least of which is that it is the setting for much of Frances Burney’s first novel, Evelina (1778). Jane Austen visited in …
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Carry him off in a patent coffin: body snatching in the eighteenth century
Occasionally Dan turned the pages of his newspaper. Someone was advertising a new design of coffin, secure enough to keep out body snatchers. Good luck with that, he thought. The …
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From Hogarth to Rowlandson: Medicine in Art in Eighteenth Century Britain, Fiona Haslam, (Liverpool University Press, 1996)
I’m often asked about how I go about doing the research for my historical novels. One of the sources I usually mention is visual art. I’ve always found that looking …
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The Contraband Killings Blog Tour 5 – 11 December 2022
The Contraband Killings: A Dan Foster Mystery is on a blog tour this week (5-11 December 2022). The tour will feature unique extracts, reviews and guest blogs. The schedule is …
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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 …
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To The Fair Land on Tour!
This week, 26 April to 2 May 2021, To The Fair Land is on a blog tour, covering twenty one blogs in seven days with a mix of articles, author …
Read MoreMrs Burnett and Mr Baret: Women at Sea
I’ve recently reissued my first novel, To The Fair Land, with a new cover. Set in the eighteenth century during the Age of Sail, it tells the story of struggling …
Read MoreIgnored, patronized and mislabeled: Eliza Haywood and The Female Spectator
I have been reading a selection of articles from The Female Spectator in an edition selected and edited by Mary Priestley and published in 1929. The introduction is by the …
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The Father of Virginia Woolf: Women and the Essay
I recently read A C Grayling’s biography The Quarrel of the Age: The Life and Times of William Hazlitt (2000). It’s the fascinating story of a fascinating man, elegantly written …
Read MoreMary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) : An Inspirational Woman
It’s International Women’s Day today and I’ve been thinking about the women who inspired me. On Friday I was at the unveiling of a Blue Plaque to one very inspirational …
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‘A Reformer’s Wife ought to be a heroine’: Women in the London Corresponding Society
In The Butcher’s Block, the second Dan Foster Mystery, Bow Street Runner Dan Foster infiltrates a fictitious, extremist branch of the London Corresponding Society (LCS) in Southwark, London. The LCS …
Read MoreAnne and Mary: Pirates! A Guest Blog by Helen Hollick
Theirs was a harsh life, overshadowed each day by the presence of death, but the lure of gold, the excitement of the Chase – and the freedom that life aboard …
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