Guest Post by Susanna Kearsley + Giveaway of The Rose Garden

I could not be more excited to be hosting my new favorite author, Susanna Kearsley, today on Passages to the Past!  Susanna is here with a guest post in honor of the Sourcebooks re-issue of her novel, The Rose Garden!  

I recently read Kearsley's novel, The Winter Sea, after seeing all of the rave reviews from my fellow book bloggers and fell in love with her writing!  It was such a fabulous story and I am really looking forward to reading the rest of her novels.  It is very thrilling for me to have here on my blog and I hope you enjoy the guest post as much as I did!

And thanks to the generous people of Sourcebooks, I have a copy of The Rose Garden to give away to one lucky reader!

And now, please welcome Susanna Kearsley...

Humanizing History

Every so often debates will spring up about the value of historical fiction, and how it compares to historical non-fiction, and whether fiction has any real place in the telling of history.

I won’t get up on my soap-box about all that here (although as both a former museum curator and a historical novelist, I have a few strong opinions) but I truly feel that historical fiction, when done well, puts back into history what the history books sometimes take out of it: the human factor.

Battles are not fought by kings and generals, they are fought by men, who breathe and love and hope and hate and dream, just like the rest of us. The paper records left to us don’t always give a sense of that, and history books concerned with “facts” (as they perceive the facts to be) are really only telling half the story.

One of the best examples I can give of this comes, not from any book I’ve written, but from one of the first historical novels I ever read: Jan Westcott’s The Hepburn. One of the major subplots in that novel tackles the tale of King James IV of Scotland and his mistress (and possibly wife), Margaret Drummond.

At the turn of the 16th century, James IV was in a power struggle with his English counterpart, Henry VII. Henry wanted James to marry Henry’s daughter Margaret. James was noncommittal. The reason for this was no secret, as described by historian Maria Perry in her 1998 book The Sisters of Henry VIII:

“In Scotland it was whispered that real impediment to James’ marriage [to Margaret Tudor] was his love for Margaret Drummond, who had been his mistress since 1496. He was said to be passionately attached to her. Many people believed that her death by poisoning in 1501 was deliberately contrived by courtiers who feared their king would never marry…while she lived.”

So, poor Margaret Drummond, along with her two sisters (who had shared the same breakfast as she had) died of poisoning, and James subsequently married Margaret Tudor. Those are the facts, and historians are limited in how they can present them.

It’s not that historians don’t allow James to have feelings. Some do. Some speculate that James was “stunned” or “devastated” by the death of the woman he patently loved, and some even go further to infer that, because he immediately rushed his and Margaret Drummond’s young daughter to a place of greater safety, and because for the rest of his life he continued to pay priests to sing prayers each year for the repose of Margaret Drummond’s soul, he must have loved her very dearly.

King Henry IV of France

Others, like the 19th century historian Thomas Wright, in his History of Scotland, give

James a very different reaction: “The chain was now broken with which James had so long been bound,” Wright states, “and he prepared eagerly for his marriage.”

But none of the historians, no matter how they try to get inside the head and heart of James IV, can do what Jan Westcott did. Here’s how she had James react to the poisoning of Margaret Drummond, the woman he loved:

“The king came through the curtained doorway. He knocked a chair out of his way. Eufemia’s face was hidden from him, Sybilla was moaning in short quick gasps; the heavy feet of men running sounded from outside. James took Maggie in his arms, he lifted her and carried her from the room where Eufemia already lay dead.

“My darling, my darling,” he whispered. He had taken her on his lap, and she was huddled against him, her legs doubled under her. She crouched on his knees, her arms around his neck, fiercely.

She could not speak. She burrowed against him. Mary came running with a bowl, and James forced Maggie’s head up. He forced her jaws open. She began to retch.

The doctor stood over her. This was the only thing to do; there was nothing more except to pray. He wiped Maggie’s mouth with a towel dipped in rosewater…”

And later in the scene, when Margaret’s dead and we are seeing through the eyes of Mary Gordon, there is this:

“James had lain Maggie on her bed. He was pulling up the white sheet. Mary saw his brown hands on the white linen.

He did not cover her face. Suddenly he tucked the sheet across her breast. He lifted her hands and crossed them. Then he bent down and Mary saw the broad shoulders shaking. Slowly she let the curtain fall back into place.”

It’s been more than thirty years since I read The Hepburn. I haven’t picked it up again until today, to read those words. But I remember every vivid image of that scene, and I have always had a soft spot for King James IV because of it, because I felt his very human grief and glimpsed him, not as a great king, but as a man.

Good history books can teach us many things about the past. Good historical fiction can connect us to it. And that, in my view at least, makes it worth writing.

About The Rose Garden...

Release Date: October 1, 2011

SYNOPSIS

When Eva’s filmstar sister Katrina dies, she leaves California and returns to Trelowarth, Cornwall , where they spent their childhood summers, to scatter Katrina’s ashes and in doing so return her to the place where she belongs.

But Eva must also confront the ghosts from her own past, as well as those from a time long before her own. For the house where she so often stayed as a child is home not only to her old friends the Halletts, but also to the people who had lived there in the eighteenth century. When Eva finally accepts that she is able to slip between centuries and see and talk to the inhabitants from hundreds of years ago, she soon finds herself falling for Daniel Butler, a man who lived – and died – long before she herself was born.

Eva begins to question her place in the present, and in laying her sister to rest, comes to realise that she too must decide where she really belongs, choosing between the life she knows and the past she feels so drawn towards.

*Susanna Kearsley's WEBSITE is really wonderful, so be sure to check it out for more information on the author and her novels.

Giveaway Information...

- To enter, please leave a comment below and include your email address (only comments with email addresses will be entered in the giveaway).

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- Giveaway ends on October 17th.

Good luck to all!