I used to think I was a bibliophile.

After all, there are 27 bookcases in our house, and they’re all overflowing. Proof positive. End of argument.

Then Kindle.

I tried the actual Kindle reader, but it was the wrong shape and size for my hands, and I could never forget that I was holding an object instead of a book. I couldn’t get lost in the story.

But I got the Kindle app for my phone, and the iBook app, and a couple of others.

My phone fits my hand. It goes everywhere with me, so there’s no extra weight or remembering to do. And because it’s so easy to hold and to turn the page, I am never jolted out of the story in the way I was with the e-reader. So I read. And read…

A few months on, I bought one of Connie Willis’s books (Blackout). It’s a fabulously researched time travel story set in the London Blitz, and I enjoyed it immensely. It’s a big book, especially as a trade paperback, which is all that was available in Australia. To my surprise, I found that I was actively resenting the book: its size, its weight, its ungainliness, the way I had to remember to take it with me… and I realised that I was not, in fact, a bibliophile. I was a, um, … narratophile?

That is, I like stories. I am addicted to stories. And I don’t care how they come. Books, magazines, tv shows, movies, radio dramas, facebook anecdotes, twitter novels… don’t care. Just want the story.

And what I love about reading on my phone is that the next fix is just a couple of button clicks away. Finish reading the second book in a series on the train? Go buy the third book immediately and start reading before you get to the next station.

Bliss. Or, possibly, greed.

Now, when I cull my library, my criterion for keeping a book is not whether I liked it or not, it’s whether I can get it as an ebook. Unless it’s a book I reread regularly, or need for some other reason (like teaching), if it’s available as electrons I cull it.

It makes me feel vaguely guilty. On the other hand, those books go out to others who will love them too, and find a new life on other shelves.

I don’t have to feel guilty. Do I?

I am reading books which were published or popular in 1921, as part of the research for my new book. Imagine my joy when I found that a Gene Stratton-Porter, Her Father’s Daughter, was a bestseller that year.

Imagine my dismay when the book turns out to be a proselytising tale about white supremacy. So sad. So horrible.

Now I have loved Gene Stratton-Porter for a long, long time. Anyone who has read my Princess Betony books will know I like to write about plants and trees and forests – as someone who grew up in a completely suburbanised environment, wildness attracts me, and I first found it written about (after the Brothers Grimm) in Stratton-Porter’s Girl of the Limberlost. There beautifully lyrical depictions of a wetlands is married to tough common sense and the values of hard work and egalitarianism. I admit, Rosie in The Willow Tree’s Daughter and later books owes something to The Girl and her mother.

Stratton-Porter certainly primed me to be a greenie, being one of the first to write deliberately towards environmentalist goals.

Her racism is not evident in these books, except in the invisible way we have come to accept – the characters are all white, so the issue never arises. (I am reminded of Margaret Maron, a favourite crime writer of mine, who gets letters from readers complaining that she always describes people by their colour, including white people – for example, a white middle-aged woman, a Latino middle-aged woman. Some readers think you don’t need to specify the whiteness of a character, presumably because that is the norm from which others deviate.)

I’m interested in the fact that Her Father’s Daughter is written toward the end of her life, when she had moved to the west coast of America for health reasons. Up until then she had lived in Indiana all her life until then… was this the first time she had encountered Asian people in any number?

For the weird thing is that, although she rails generally about ‘the white man’ being superior to all other colours, the focus of her racism is Japan. She is convinced (in 1921, after the Japanese have been allies in WWI!) that Japan is set on a course of War with the US. So I am wincing away from the racism, but occasionally it reads as prescience.

I was shocked by her racism because in so many other ways she presents a modern mind-set. Her female characters are strong, determined and extremely competent women, her books have an explicit feminist agenda, she is egalitarian, green and delighted by the advancements of the modern age.

I will finish reading this book because it’s for research, and it’s started me thinking about my main characters’ likely attitude to the Yellow Peril, so embedded in Australian politics of the time. But will I go back to reread Girl of the Limberlost, as I have done with pleasure in the past?
I don’t know. My genuine love of the book has been tainted, somehow. Part of me feels this is not fair to the book. That if we demand that all our authors share all our beliefs we will be limited to reading only our own books. That a book is its own thing, separate from the author, read on its own terms.

And part of me thinks: I don’t want to give a white supremacist access to the inside of my head.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been researching the NSW town of Taree, as it was in the 1920s. I have a lot more research to do, and I’m looking forward to it.

But one of the things I have most enjoyed is looking through the terrific indexes to the town’s newspaper the Northern Champion, which have been put together by Rod and Wendy Gow. I’ve sent off my order to them to get a complete copy, but even the parts which are available on their website are engrossing.

Forget the big news stories of the day; those were reported pretty much the same all over the country. It’s the small items, written by local reporters, which are wonderful to dwell upon.

These country newspapers chronicled everything. Births, deaths, marriages, obviously, but also when someone left to move to another town, or a local weather event, or a bankruptcy, the paper half gossip and half news.

Look at this great list of what is indexed:

Accident, Anniversary, Apology, Appointment, Arrival, Assault victim, Auction license, Award, Bailiff sale, Baptism, Benefit, Bequest, Billiard license, Birth, Birthday, Body missing, Burial, Bursary, Cattle sale, Cremation, Dealer’s license, Death, Died of wounds, Divorce, Engagement, Estate, Exhumation, Farewell, Funeral, Grave, Hawker’s license, Honeymoon, Honour Roll, In Memoriam, Induction, Inheritance, Inquest, Insolvent, Killed in Action, Leaving district, Left district, Legal, Legal appointment, Legal notice, Lightning strike, Lost, Lost at sea, Marriage, Medal, Medical, Memorial, Memorial poem, Memorial service, Missing, Monument, Murder victim, Naturalisation, Obituary, Ordination, Overseas trip, Partnership, Photograph, Poetry, Presentation, Prize winner, Probate, Promotion, Property sale, Remains recovery, Requiem mass, Rescue, Resignation, Retirement, Return, Return thanks, Reward, Robbery victim, Sale withdrawn, Scholarship, Shooting accident, Shooting victim, Snake bite, Social, Sunday license, Testimonial, Transfer, University degree, War veteran, Welcome, Wounded.

It’s like a found poem: Requiem mass, Rescue, Resignation…

Out of these scraps of information I am building the town again in my head. Not its bricks and mortar (or, more likely in Taree, its weatherboards), but the people and their relationships. There is Miss Gavin, Nurse (probationer), being appointed to the MRD Hopsital: imagine the nervousness of her first day of work, her high ideals confronting the reality of the bedpans or, if she were a country girl, her delight at working inside and only having to deal with shit in a neat little receptacle, instead of all over the stable floor. Could she be one of my main character’s friends?

I sorrow over the the death of Master Hermann Gill, aged 10, in Raleigh Hospital. I have a son. My heart aches for his parents.

Dr and Mrs Gormley leave Taree – there is an announcement, followed by an article on the presentation made to them on their departure. Or Mr & Mrs Hawkins, leaving Gulgong to go to Oxley Island… how exciting that seems, until you realise that Oxley Island is only a few miles away, near the mouth of the Manning River.

Certain people, including Mr Hawkins, turn up again and again in stories about the Taree District Court. We must hope that he is a solicitor or barrister… since the Northern Champion is not yet on Trove, I must visit the State Library and look at the microfilm to find out if he is in or outside the dock, or if he is merely litigious or bad at paying his bills. We do know that he ran to granddaughters rather than grandsons – at least two, daughters of RS Hawkins. I was confused at first by the statement Birth: daughter of Mrs RS Hawkins, knowing from another entry that RS was Robert S, but of course women didn’t even keep their own first names once they were married. It was Mr & Mrs RS Hawkins, and only friends would actually call you by your first name. Many people wouldn’t even know it. (I was interested in the Hawkinses because Ruby, the main character in The Soldier’s Wife, was a Hawkins – named for my mother-in-law. Ruby grew up in Bourke. Perhaps these Hawkinses were relatives!)

I have a special fondness for Captain Hector Gollan (retired master mariner) who is listed both in stories about Taree District Court, and in a special article about his 75th birthday. A robust old man, I think, full of vim and liable to sue people who don’t follow orders!

I could easily get obsessive about this endeavour. Perhaps I must, if I’m going to make Taree live and breathe and dance and cry as it should.

So happy to announce that Hachette Livre will be publishing my new historical novel, A Soldier’s Wife, next year! And, even better, I will get to work again with the wonderful Bernadette Foley.

A Soldier’s Wife is the story of Ruby Hawkins during the time her husband Jimmy is away at Gallipoli, and following their struggles to adapt to the new war-driven world when he is returned to Australia with debilitating wounds.

I was inspired to write this story by my own family’s history – my grandfather was at Gallipoli, and I have used his war service as the basis for Jimmy’s experiences. When my grandfather was wounded, his sister received a series of telegrams from the Army telling her of his injury, and then keeping her informed of his very serious illness. I showed those telegrams to my son’s class in 2013 for Anzac Day, and wondered what it had been like to receive them. To wait, day after day, for the news of life or death. That was the beginning of A Soldier’s Wife, and that is why I will be dedicating it to both my grandfather, Arthur Freeman, and his sister Esther, who received the telegrams.

My grandfather wasn’t married when he went to war (he put his age up to get into the Army) but he met his future wife while he was recovering in the Repatriation Hospital at Randwick, when she came to visit some a friend who was in the same ward. Maybe I should tell that story next!

After a recent class where I discussed my ‘four-colour printing process’ approach to writing scenes, one of my students asked me to do a blog post about it. So this is for you, JJ!

I developed this way of thinking about writing scenes when I made the transition from writing for children to writing for adults. I wrote my first adult book as my thesis for a Doctor of Creative Arts degree, and my supervisor, the wonderful Debra Adelaide, kept saying, ‘You need more reflection, more thinking from your characters about what’s going on.’

In children’s writing, there are two factors which mitigate against the characters doing a lot of thinking – firstly, you often have illustrations which show the character’s state, so the reader can figure a lot out for themselves and, secondly, a lot of reflection may slow the story down too much for younger readers. Yes, you need some, but for adults I had to learn how to integrate more reflection into my writing. Also, I was writing a fantasy, the Castings trilogy; a genre which demands far more descriptive detail of the environment than most do.

So I needed a way to make sure I was including enough information for adult fantasy readers: thus, the four-colour process. When a full-colour picture is printed in a magazine, the black is laid down first, then the other colours: magenta, cyan and yellow (red, blue and yellow). Only when you have all four colours do you have a life-like picture. Anyone who has had a colour toner cartridge run dry on them in the middle of printing will know what a three-colour picture looks like: odd, distorted, uneven.

In my writing process:

Black = what happens: dialogue, action, movement, anything which influences the plot.
Red = Emotions. This is tricky, because it is not just the point of view character’s emotions, it’s what everyone in the scene is feeling. Sometimes, this affects the Black – you must show what other people are feeling by their expressions, actions, movements, etc.
Blue = Reflection/thoughts. This is pov territory – but, again, if you want to convey what other people in the scene are doing, Blue will impact upon Black.
Yellow = Environment/description. Can be vitally important. For me, the thinking about Yellow has to happen before I write the scene, so that I can accurately visualise Black.

I’m much better at Black and Red than I am at Blue. Yellow, it depends on the story.

So, when I do a first draft, it’s often heavy on the Black and the Red, and light on the others, although the Yellow may be implied (eg if someone picks up a rock to throw it, there were rocks in the environment).

Knowing this, I don’t think of my ‘first draft’ as a proper first draft until I have gone through the scene and made sure I have given the reader the right proportions of each colour to create a vivid, life-like scene. I do this before I go on to the next scene. Only when I’ve painted all the colours appropriately, do I think I have a ‘first draft’.

Now I am writing historical fiction, I find the process is the same; I need more description than in contemporary fiction in order to make the world in 1915 vivid for my readers, and it’s crucial to explain my character’s thought processes, because they are often quite different to what a modern woman might think in the same situation.

The great advantage of this way of thinking about a scene is that it makes you consider what each character is thinking and feeling, and this helps make those characters more alive for the reader (and for the writer; it often changes a scene significantly when you finally realise what that one recalcitrant character is really thinking!).

I’d be curious if other writers have other systems – please comment if you do!

Recently I had conversations with several of my beta readers which made me think long and hard about general ignorance.

I am working on a novel set in World War I, A Soldier’ Wife, and I thought I had put in enough background on the war itself – surely most people know about WWI, I thought. Wrong.

One of my beta readers comes from a non-English speaking background, from a country which wasn’t involved in the conflict. She had a vague notion that England and Germany fought, and she knew that Anzac Day was about Australians who went to fight for England – but she thought they were fighting Germans at Gallipolli.

One of them was quite young. She knew all about Gallipolli, because they’d covered it in school, but she didn’t know much about the war in Europe. More importantly, perhaps, since the characters in the novel never go to Europe, she didn’t know much about daily life in Sydney. She got quite annoyed with me for having my character take a tram to Randwick, because there aren’t any trams in Randwick! (Not now, I said, but… she was astonished and a bit irate: Why did they take them away? she asked. Why, indeed.)

Subsequent to this, I had a chat with a writer friend who felt that I’d put a bit too much historical detail in because, ‘surely everyone knows that?’ Apparently not.

One of the challenges in writing historical fiction is putting in enough explanation to set the story but not so much that you bore people who already know it all.

In writing A Soldier’s Wife, I drew on my experience in creating fantasy worlds. It’s much the same process. You have to give a combination of straight-out explanations and a number of more subtle clues. Some of those clues won’t be picked up by the general reader, but the intelligent or experienced reader will note them with pleasure.

However,when you’re writing fantasy you can assume a certain level of ignorance. After all, you’ve made up this world, and anything you have made up you can assume you need to explain. When you’re writing historical fiction, you have to guess at the level of knowledge your readers may have.

World War I is beyond living memory. There are no Anzacs left alive. There are no people who were adults during the war left alive, as far as I know. So everything we know is based on anecdote, history lessons, books, TV and films.

The lesson I’ve drawn from all this is: don’t assume any knowledge on the part of your readers. For some people, A Soldier’s Wife will be their first introduction to World War I. For others, all they will know is what they’ve seen on Downton Abbey. And that’s okay. It’s part of the fun of historical writing, to introduce people to fascinating, disturbing or enjoyable facts which you have discovered. I enjoy sharing my vision of Sydney in 1915-16 – I just hope others enjoy reading it!

As a mid-career author who writes for both children and adults, I’m always interested in how other people juggle that identity split. So I’m delighted to have Mindy Klasky, the author of some of my favourite light paranormals, to share her thoughts about just that.

Mindy writes:

I was sitting in my new editor’s office. Meetings like that are always a bit fraught, so I’d worried about what to wear, I’d brought a box of chocolates to break the ice, and I’d practiced all my answers to the questions I most expected to be asked. We’d gotten off on the right foot because I’d already read about half of the books in my editor’s office – bright-covered board books for little kids, thought-provoking chapter books for middle grade readers.

About five minutes in, my editor asked, “What’s your most recent published book?”

I answered, “The Mogul’s Maybe Marriage. It’s a category romance about an arrogant pharmaceutical magnate and the woman he impregnates after a one-night stand.”

Without missing a beat, my editor asked, “Have you chosen your pseudonym for us yet?”

I hadn’t, of course. I’d hoped that I could keep writing as Mindy Klasky, the same way I’d used my name for traditional fantasy and for light paranormal and for category romance. But when kids are involved, the rules shift a bit.

Because kids were involved, I became “Morgan Keyes” for my middle grade novels.

Now, a few years down the road, I’m still juggling names. “Morgan” continues to write the Darkbeast books – they’re traditional fantasy for kids, set in a secondary world, looking at the moral and ethical issues in a society where children are raised to murder their animal companions in order to assume a role as an adult in their society.

And Mindy is writing the Diamond Brides Series, contemporary romance novels about players on the (imaginary) Raleigh Rockets baseball team and the women who love them. These short novels are hot. Really hot. Hot as in, my father read an advance copy of Perfect Pitch (in stores for the first time this week!) and thanked me for giving him advance notice so he could call our family lawyer and change his last name.

I think he was just kidding. I hope.

Some people erect huge walls between their pseudonyms. They create corporations to hide their identities; they manage all promotion and social media through vast screens, so that no one ever has any clue as to the authors’ true selves. Writers have even threatened litigation against people who reveal those links (J.K. Rowling/Robert Galbraith, anyone?)

Other pseudonyms are absolutely “open books”, if you’ll pardon the pun. Anyone who searches a second can find out that Nora Roberts is also J.D. Robb. Steven King has reissued his Richard Bachman books, with both names on the cover.

Me, I’ve walked a middle road. On my Morgan Keyes website, I never mention that I’m Mindy Klasky. The entire goal of my pen name is to keep impressionable young minds from finding my racier books quite so easily (even though some of my more mature young readers would easily grasp some of my adult books, such as The Glasswrights Series. Sometimes, authors need to work with blunt instruments instead of fine scalpels!)

Even on my Mindy Klasky website, I don’t list Morgan Keyes’ name directly. I understand the power of the almighty search engine, and I know that any kid who types “Morgan Keyes” into Google would find my far-more-visited Mindy Klasky website on the first page of results, if I made that link explicit. I vastly prefer for searchers to find at least one full page of “Morgan Keyes” results, unsullied by my adult-author name.

But when Morgan releases a book, Mindy talks about it. Heck (or rather, “hell” – I’m writing this as Mindy), when Mindy releases a book, she sometimes talks about Morgan – this blog post being but one example.

It’s not a perfect divide. Some kids might find out more than they expected to know. But I trust kids to be like I was – inquisitive, daring, and a little self-protective. If I’d discovered Perfect Pitch when I was ten years old, I likely would have passed right over it. I wasn’t interested in boys, much less in naked men’s torsos on book covers. I definitely wasn’t intrigued by romantic banter. And while I understood the mechanics of how my body worked, I didn’t understand why anyone would want to read about that stuff, not when there were exciting books about adventures, and quests, and prophecies to fulfill.

How about you? Do you remember the first book you read with adult content? Were you old enough to understand it? Did you care? Did your parents care?

Thanks, Pamela, for letting me visit and discuss this topic with your readers!

Thank you, Mindy! As you can see from the cover of Perfect Pitch, it’s pretty clear what kind of books these are. (I’m not surprised your father blushed, Mindy! I wouldn’t dare let my parents read this.)

My adult books weren’t quite as racy so I kept my name and used the universe of my fantasy books as the website for my adult books (castingstrilogy.com). But I have an urban fantasy series with publishers now where I’ll probably go the pseudonym route myself, for many of the same reasons.

This post is written as part of the Women’s History Month Cranky Ladies of History blog tour. If you would like to read more about cranky ladies from the past, you might like to support the FableCroft Publishing Pozible campaign, crowd-funding an anthology of short stories about Cranky Ladies of History from all over the world.

I’m not sure that my pick for this month is really a ‘cranky lady’. She was too much of a lady ever to show crankiness. But she was, shall we say, determined, and I idolised her.

In 1987, in company with Karen Miller, I travelled to Queensland to interview Lores Bonney (pronounced ‘Lorry’) for the Powerhouse Museum. She became a personal hero for me. A bright, funny, intelligent, incredibly brave woman who accomplished enough for three lifetimes.

Never heard of her, right?

But I’ll bet you’ve heard of Amelia Earheart, or Amy Johnson? Lores Bonney was a better pilot than either of them, and flew further and faster. And she was her own mechanic.

Her birth name was ‘Maude’ – Maude Rose Rubens. She was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and left there when she was five, first for England and later for Australia. This was when she changed her name. Her best friend in South Africa was ‘Dolores’, whom everyone called ‘Lores’ (pronounced Laurie). Mourning her lost friend, Lores insisted on being called by the same name. It was a good indication of her strength of will that everyone complied.

Her father was a furniture manufacturer in Melbourne. He just missed overlapping with my great-grandfather, who was also a furniture manufacturer in Melbourne, but who moved to New Zealand at about the same time.

Lores’ father had no great opinion of women, and when the handsome and rather dashing Harry Bonney wanted to marry her, Mr Rubens insisted that Harry first swear that he would never allow her to drive a car. Deeply in love, Harry agreed – but he never promised anything about a plane, so after their marriage, when Lores wanted to learn to fly, he not only paid for lessons, he bought her a Gypsy Moth and had his workshop make her a set of leather flying clothes.

She shouldn’t have got her licence, because she was deaf in one ear from a perforated eardrum. But the doctor doing the test was a friend, she told me, and spoke in the regulation whisper while testing her good ear, but spoke QUITE LOUDLY when testing her bad one.

And she flew – oh, how she flew. Egged on by her husband’s cousin, Bert Hinkler, she set the long distance flying record in Australia (never been broken). She flew from Australia to England in 1933 – and that’s the hard direction, fighting the winds all the way. Even so, if she hadn’t been caught in a thunderstorm on Bang Biang Island and forced to crash land, she would have broken Amy Johnson’s record (Johnson came the easy way, from London to Sydney). After the crash, Lores supervised the repairs, and nonchalantly got back in her battered little De Havilland (nicknamed ‘My Little Ship’) and completed the trip. Why do it the hard way? ‘Because everyone was going the other way.’

And then, just for something to do, she flew from Australia to South Africa. On her own. In a Klemm 32 monoplance. The first person – not the first woman – to do so.

No one else has ever done this. I don’t mean in a Klemm, I mean that no other lone pilot has ever flown from Australia to South Africa. Since 1937.

Not only did she do all this, she did it with grace and flare. Since this was still the days of the Empire, wherever she went she was invited to dinner at Government House, or the District Commissioner’s house, or similar. So she had a special dress made, calf length, with a wide V neck. Then she had a matching floor-length petticoat. If she was invited to afternoon tea, she wore just the dress. If she was invited to dinner, she wore the dress with the petticoat underneath, and it looked like a dinner dress. She washed out her ‘smalls’ in the evening and strung them up on a line in the back of the cockpit to dry as she flew.

And then the war came, and private pilots couldn’t get fuel. Her darling plane was burnt in a fire in the hangar – she always believed it was arson, set by the man who shared the hangar with her, because he couldn’t use his plane but no-one would buy it because of the fuel restrictions. She never piloted a plane again.

Lores told me that she believed that if she ever flew again, she’d crash. She said she’d had a clear message from ‘The Co-Pilot’ (God). But that didn’t stop her having adventures.

After her husband died, she decided she was interested in learning how to make bonsai, so she took herself off to Japan and became the first Westerner to become an accredited bonsai ‘master’.

When she was in her 70s, she went down the Amazon in a canoe.

By the time I met her, she was starting to feel frail. She had decided to donate her memorabilia to the PowerHouse Museum (where I worked) and the interview I taped that day became part of an exhibition about her there.

If you look for the name ‘Lores Bonney’ in the record books, you won’t find it. It will read ‘Mrs Harry Bonney’. There were a lot of women (at the time, and since) who thought she should have used her own name, so I asked her why she hadn’t.

‘This is for posterity, I suppose,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said, and waited.

She nodded, and hesitated, and then nodded again. She told me – with some difficulty – that she had been unable to give Harry children, and that this was the only way she could make his name live on.

(You can see the Mrs Harry ‘Lores’ Bonney collection at the Powerhouse Museum.)

Here is a picture of some of her gear. But it doesn’t show the most useful thing she took with her – a hot water bottle, to use as a flying toilet. ‘The boys can use a bottle,’ she said, laughing. ‘But a hot water bottle is a woman’s best friend in the air.’

After telling me all this, she patted my hand kindly and told me her words to live by: ‘Don’t ever let them tell you you can’t do it.’ Sounds like a Cranky Ladies of History motto to me.

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We hear a lot about showing and not telling, but lately I’ve been thinking about it in a new way.

I’ve been taking a masterclass with Mary Stewart – not, unfortunately, in person, as she is 97 and not gadding about much anymore (isn’t it great to know she’s still alive?). No, I have been re-reading her books. Specifically, her romantic suspense novels.

I first read these books as a teenager. Loved them then, love them now. Later, I found her Arthurian (Merlinian) series, which begins with the magnificent The Crystal Cave, and which strongly influenced my own approach to fantasy writing. Nowadays, she is best known for these books.

But for most of her writing career, her suspense novels were her mainstay. She wrote 15 of them, starting with Madam, Will You Talk? in 1954 and ending with Rose Cottage in 1997. Along the way she also wrote children’s novels and poetry.

Two things stand out for me about Mary Stewart’s suspense novels. The first is the description. She has an extraordinary, detailed knowledge of plants and ecosystems. There is never a casual reference to ‘flowers blooming’. No, she tells you exactly what flowers are blooming (in an Alpine pasture):

The grass was thick with familiar meadow flowers – harebells, thyme, eyebright, and, where the scythe had not yet passed, the foaming white and yellow of parsley and buttercups.

Or, on a Greek island:

After the dappled dimness of the wood, it took some moments before one could do more than blink at the dazzle of colour. Straight ahead of me an arras of wisteria hung fully fifteen feet, and below it there were roses. Somewhere to one side was a thicket of purple judas-trees, and apple-blossom glinted with the wings of working bees.

Her books are often set in ‘exotic’ locations: Provence, Damascus, Greece (both mainland and islands), Austria, the Scilly Isles. And I could easily be persuaded that she went to these places to study the plants and wrote the novels merely to finance the trips. Her locations are alive with plants, animals, sounds, smells and tastes, and the characters emerge out of them inevitably, or stand out in sharp contrast with the rural or exotic setting. It was part of her appeal to her early reading public: it was rare, in those days, for people to be familiar with the foreign; there was no David Attenborough to lead you through the multi-coloured world with a whisper as your guide. Even television was in black and white, so Stewart’s colourful descriptions were really necessary as well as evocative; her readers were being introduced to a truly new place.

(I must admit, I have wondered if she became so interested in colour because her maiden name was Mary Rainbow. Seriously.)

The other element which astonishes me in Stewart’s work is the sheer craft in her storytelling. In particular, the way she withholds information from the reader without the reader noticing.

She shows so much, and so compellingly, that we are blinded, unaware that we have not been told a crucial piece of information: what the character is thinking.

Let me give you a perfect example. Vanessa March has come to Austria in search of her husband, whom she has seen on a newsreel in a small Austrian town, instead of being in Stockholm on business as she believes. She and a young companion, Tim, identify the town and go there.

A man had just turned in from the street under the dappled shade of the chestnut trees. He paused there, looking towards our table. I believe I was already half out of my chair, regardless of what Annalisa might think. I heard Timothy say something, some question. And then the newcomer moved forward from the patch of shadow into the sunlight, and I met, full on, his indifferent, unrecognizing eyes and slight look of surprise.

I think I said, ‘No, no, it’s not,’ to Timothy as I sank back into my chair.

We then have introductions between Vanessa, Tim and Lee Eliot, the newcomer. There is small talk.

I managed to pull myself out of the turmoil into which the appearance of the “other Englishman” had plunged me, and answered him civilly, if slightly at random. ‘Oh, I can believe that…’

And the scene goes on. Later, Vanessa admits to Tim that she had been mistaken. That Lee Elliot looks remarkably like her husband, but is not him. That she has come on a wild goose chase, a ‘dreadful mistake’.

And then, later that night, when Vanessa is in bed in the Gasthof… (a full chapter and a half later, during which quite a lot happens)…

Then the hand parted the curtains. He didn’t make a sound, just slid between them like a ghost. As I sat up in bed, pulling the puff round me, he was already turning to draw the long windows shut. They latched with a tiny click. He stood there just inside the shadows, listening.

‘All right, Mr Elliot,’ I said. ‘I’m awake.’

Because, of course, Lee Elliot is her husband after all, and he has given her the ‘high sign to say nothing’ when they met, so she has pretended that he is a stranger instead of her husband, Lewis. Lewis, she now discovers, is an English ‘agent’. A more domestic version of James Bond.

So let’s look at how she did it. How does she make us not notice when she leaves something this important out of a first person narrative? She slides from inside Vanessa’s thoughts to Vanessa’s experiences and feelings, that’s how. We are told exactly what happens: Lewis looks at her with unrecognizing eyes. At that moment we have the switch: now we are told what she does, but in such a way that we think we understand what she is feeling. Look at the subtlety of ‘I think I said, ‘No, no, it’s not’.

It implies confusion. It implies a reaction. And she is, indeed, both confused and reacting, but not to what we are led to believe. Later, when Vanessa lies to Tim, she lies to the reader as well, and she does it by simply omitting her real thoughts.

Stewart’s ability to pull off this trick is even more impressive because she writes in first person. She uses our assumption, inherent in most first person narratives, that we are ‘listening in’ on our main character’s thoughts; even though we are clearly being ‘told’ the story. She uses our assumption that the narrator is reliable, in fact, and she gets away with it because Stewart only does this kind of sleight of hand with the romance.

She never plays these tricks with the suspense part of the plot. Where action, reaction and exposition are concerned, she plays it straight down the line. We are told everything we need to know and we are told it in all the necessary detail. And those descriptions I talked about earlier play their part, too. We are given such a wealth of physical detail about the narrator’s world that it’s easy to miss the fact her thoughts are being withheld.

So we trust our narrator. And then there are these slips, these withholdings, which are presented, I sometimes think, as a kind of English reticence, that not-putting-your-feelings-on-display ethic which seems to outsiders (and perhaps to British people too?) to be so much a part of the traditional English middle-to-upper-classes.

Here’s another example, from This Rough Magic. The heroine, Lucy, and the hero, Max, have just saved a beached dolphin (a wonderful, intense scene in the middle of a plot about smuggling and murder) on the Greek island of Corfu, during which endeavour they kiss. They are going up to Max’s place to dry off.

‘… What’s more, these blasted boots are full of water.’ (Max)
‘You might have drowned.’ (Lucy)
‘So I might. And how much would that have been to Apollo’s account?’
‘You know how much,’ I said, not lightly at all, but not for him to hear.

Now the point is that, up until this scene, Lucy has apparently distrusted Max and been not all that attracted to him. When you read back, however, you see that Stewart describes him minutely, but leaves out all of Lucy’s physical or emotional reactions to him. The kiss comes, as it were, out of the blue, and although we may have suspected that Lucy liked Max, there was never any confession of her feelings, to us as readers, or to Max. The kisses are passionate, but not romantic, and are told through dialogue and physical description.

So this ‘You know how much’ is the reader’s first insight into how Lucy might actually feel about him. Stewart ends the chapter on that note. We are given no further insight into Lucy’s feelings. The two go up to the house, plot ensues, and then, later, Max asks Lucy whether she meant the thing he was not supposed to hear. At first annoyed ‘at his obtuseness in asking this’, Lucy looks at him and decides,

I was the one who was stupid. If one asks a question, it is because one wants to know the answer. Why should he have to wait and wrap it up some other way when the ‘moment’ suited me?

It was a better kiss this time, no less breathless, but at least we were dry and warm, and had known each other nearly two hours longer…

I could write another 500 words about the cleverness of this speech and the sentences which surround it. Look at that ‘quite easily after all’. That tells us what we want to know.

Lucy is wholehearted, holding nothing back, like all Stewart’s heroines. If we had been in her mind all along, through the inevitable ‘does he like me?’ and ‘how attractive he is’, then her speech would seem, not wholehearted, but over the top – not full, but fulsome. By exercising restraint in the narration, Stewart can write not about romance but about love, and make us believe it. Her lovers rarely go through the classic periods of misunderstanding we associate with romance writing – they are united, once any initial problems are sorted through, against a common enemy, and they commit to each other with extraordinary ease, compared to most romance stories.

‘It’s ridiculous,’ one of her heroines says about this sudden love. ‘Yes,’ replies the hero, ‘but there it is.’ This prosaic acceptance allows us to accept it, too. And then they get on with the story.

This, I think, is what I’m learning from Stewart in my masterclass. Less is more. Elegant, not overblown. It’s okay not to wallow in the emotions of your main character, even if those emotions are love and desire and need.

Of course, knowing how she did it and being able to do it myself are two entirely different things…