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 recently spoke to best-selling author Nicola Cornick about her timeslip novels for the Historical Novels Review, February 2022. The article is republished here and is also available on my website as a PDF document.  At a 2021 conference on ‘Imagining History: Wales in Fiction and Fact’, Dr Marian Gwyn remarked, “historical fiction teaches us how people and places connect”. (1) For readers of historical fiction, a sense of place is an important element establishing not only the physical milieu of a novel, but also the historical one. This is often achieved, as the familiar mantra has it, by evoking the “sights, sounds and smells” of a setting, that is, through the senses of the people in it. A sense of place is created by the characters connected with it. However, setting may have another function besides conveying a...

Author Photo Rebecca Millar Photography I'm delighted to welcome self-confessed 'Roman Nut' Alison Morton to my blog today. Alison is the author of the stunning Roma Nova series - you can find out more about the books below. Heroines don't come much feistier than Alison's protagonists - but what makes a feisty heroine? And can you have a feisty hero? ‘Tough’, ‘feisty’, ‘kick-ass’ – clichés, ironic words or signposts? And, provocative question, would you apply them to men? Perhaps the first one and possibly the third, but I can’t remember reading about a ‘feisty hero’.   But what is a tough heroine?    Boudica , queen of the British Iceni tribe who led an uprising against the occupying forces of the Roman Empire? Jane Eyre, whose strength of will and character drive her to survive challenges in her life? Violette Szabo, a true story immortalised in Carve her Name with Pride – courageous, understated, self-sacrificing? Cloelia, a Roman ...

One thing I saved up from my mini account of what I saw of the Historical Novel Society’s Conference in Manchester in October was the workshop Creative Writing, Creative Reading: Bringing the Past to Life . What, I thought as I pondered the programme, is that about? I had no idea. So I went. The session was run by Orna Ross, an Irish novelist and teacher of Creative Intelligence. Creative Intelligence: right. Well, Orna defines it as “the ability to own and hone our innate creative potential…by understanding how the creative process works and learning to apply it.” She believes that our formal schooling, with its obsession with measurement, analysis and efficiency, has stifled our creative intelligence. I picture this as the Gradgrindian world that Dickens described so wonderfully in Hard Times : the world where innocents are murdered by facts, by rules, by a pair of scales. I don’t think anyone has exposed this outlook any better than Dickens. But doing is always better than talking a...