In this behind-the-scenes blog series, Sapere Books authors offer an intriguing insight into how, where and why they write.
Isolde’s writing space
Today, we are delighted to spotlight Isolde Martyn, the author of a number of historical novels including The Lady and the Unicorn and The Knight and the Rose.
Instead of looking out at rose bushes and oak trees or hearing blackbirds, I face an office window that is flanked by palm lilies, and the bird noises come from kookaburras and sulphur-crested cockatoos. None of which is very helpful when I am attempting to describe a scene in fifteenth-century England or thirteenth-century France. Living in Sydney, my research is limited to the occasional overseas trip or the internet. Fortunately, the latter is so fantastic these days and British History Online is now one of my go-to places.
Inspiration? Visiting Carcassonne and Minerve in France and hearing how the Northern French crusaders ransacked the land of the troubadours. Or sometimes it’s someone’s talk quivering my antennae. My second novel, The Knight and the Rose, resulted from hearing a fellow historian cite a rare medieval divorce case that involved a ‘green card’ situation. My third book, The Silver Bride, was hatched from reading of a daughter dressing in armour to fight a duel for her cowardly dad, plus wondering what it would have been like to be a clairvoyant woman back in the 1480s. The Golden Widows arose out of a friend taking me to visit Shute Barton in Devon and hearing about Warwick the Kingmaker’s youngest sister losing seven menfolk in battle. That gave rise to the idea of two young widows on opposite sides in the Wars of the Roses in the early 1460s: Katherine Neville and Elizabeth Woodville.
Historical novelists tend to go over the ground with a metal detector trying to find new angles. It becomes a challenge, especially with the Tudors. Fortunately, the character who was trying to get my attention was from the previous century and one of history’s most mysterious wheelers and dealers, the twenty-nine-year-old Duke of Buckingham, Richard III’s cousin, and so the tale of a villain and a loser came to life in The Devil in Ermine.
‘Write a woman next, a shameless gold-digger,’ suggested my agent. It didn’t work. Instead, on further acquaintance that most appealing of royal mistresses, Elizabeth Lambard — aka ‘Shore’s wife’ — took charge of the writing, and away we went with Mistress to the Crown.
I still envy novelists living in the UK for being able to easily do location research, but living in Australia hasn’t stifled my lifelong interest in… Oh, there goes another kookaburra!
