Anne's Blog

Which of these doctors would you prefer to come to your bedside as you writhe around in pain, the one in 21st century PPE or the 17th century masked man? Why the beak, you ask? It was both a way to identify him as a plague doctor and into which he could cram the herbs that were supposed to ward off the poisonous miasma people believed carried the disease. Surprisingly, his historical garb, a gown of waxed leather and a long stick with which to social distance himself, isn't that different from today's! How are you coping with the strangeness of our new pandemic normal? I would argue that it is tougher for us now to take all these weeks of trying to avoid COVID-19 than it was for those who went through the Black Death in 1340s and the Great Plague in London in 1665. Here are my theories, whacky though they may be! Disease was a way of life back then, and it was why when you look at the statistics of life expectancy in, say, medieval times, it is much lower than today...

I was lucky enough to be on a panel with Margaret George and Sharon Kay Penman at the 2015 Historical Novel Society Conference in Denver when we discussed writing about the "bad boys" of history!) The great Sharon Kay Penman has graciously posted a Q&A with me on her blog! You have no idea how special it is to have the author of one of my favorite books give "This Son of York" such support. http://sharonkaypenman.com/ blog/?p=709 Sharon's own new book "The Land Beyond the Sea" comes out in March, so be sure to check out your favorite bookstore or library!

It's at about this time of every year that I get nostalgic for an Easter-family Christmas. (Yes, I have heard all the Easter/Christmas jokes!) One of my first Christmas memories was at five years old during our three years in Germany. Our German nanny, Anneliese, taught my mother how to make an adventscrantz to hang in the hallway at the bottom of the wide staircase in our rented house in Hamburg. (My father was a British Army colonel and Port Commandant of the port just after WWII.) We learned the tradition of singing carols and lighting one of the candles each Sunday of the four weeks before Christmas. There were a few celebrations where we were not altogether as a family, while my parents lived in Egypt and we three kids were farmed out to grandparents, godparents or aged great-aunts--and sometimes not together. But when we were back as a family in England, music played a big part in the festivities--my father being a trained singer and a self-taught pianist, and all ...

Anne signing after the Jabberwocky launch on Nov. 15th. "But surely this isn't right?" I told the bellman of the brand new Trump Hotel in Chicago (yes, I know!). "I am just a lowly novelist." "I assure you this is your suite, madam," he replied, grinning and opening the door wider into two enormous rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows and a marble bathroom with a bath I could swim laps in. I squeaked a "thank you," and he retired with a paltry tip in his hand. That was then --2009 to be exact--on one of the stops on my third book tour across the country in support of The King's Grace .. I'd made enough of a name for myself as a Simon & Schuster author to warrant them sending me to Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, Chicago, Memphis, St. Louis, Portland OR, and Seattle. Now, it's couch-surfing with friends and Holiday Inns at our own expense. Then : At each airport I was met by an escort who drove me to the hotel and checked ...

Medieval bones found during renovations at the Tower of London recently. I found this new story really interesting pertaining to another medieval-bones discovery at the Tower... This discovery reminded me of the more famous unearthing of the alleged bones of the two young princes, who disappeared in Richard III's time, by workmen doing renovations at the Tower of London in the 1660s. So the story goes, the workers threw them in a heap with other rubbish but reported the finding to a higher up, who wondered if perhaps these were the bones of those princes and so retrieved them. Why would he have assumed they might be the princes' remains, you ask? Here's where Tudor propaganda once again comes to the fore. Sir Thomas More, writing at the court of Henry VIII, wrote "The Historie of King Richard III," a damning book about Richard, used by Shakespeare as one of his sources, in which More describes the princes' deaths by murderers sent by Richard: ...

I am so pleased to have been asked to share my thoughts about This Son of York with my friend and fellow historical-fiction author Sophie Perinot. If you haven't read her book Medici's Daughter about Marguerite of Valois (Queen Margot), then you are missing out! Sophie is a fabulous writer and has spent a weekend at our house when she was a panelist at the Newburyport Literary Festival. Her latest collaboration is Ribbons of Scarlet about the French Revolution with five other authors. I'm in the middle of it and am learning A LOT! Thanks again for hosting me on your blog , Sophie!

The gatehouse of Brancepeth Castle, Co. Durham Most of my on-the-ground research has been in England and Belgium, and I pride myself that I have pretty much explored everywhere my characters would have walked, although not all the venues look the same as they did in the 15th century. Two incidents—one serendipitous and one funny—come to mind when I look back on nearly 20 years of traveling for research. In Mechelen, Belgium (Malines, Burgundy in Margaret of York’s time), my travel companion Maryann and I were traipsing around the town, she taking photos and I scribbling descriptions, making our way to one of Margaret’s principal residences. I knew it was now used as a theater but I really wanted to go inside and see if I felt any Margaret vibes. It was shut up tight, and I groaned. Undaunted, I circled the building and saw a modern, glassed-in staircase tacked on the back. Before Maryann could stop me, I tried the door, found it open and marched up the stairs, no knowing where ...