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In The Master's Bed by Blythe Gifford Available Now! She's disguised as a man in a place where women are forbidden. Now, she's met a man who, for the first time, makes her want to be a woman. What will happen when he discovers her secret and she's discovered IN THE MASTER'S BED? Welcome Blythe! This is your fourth, fourteenth century medieval. IN The MASTER’S BED is set in Cambridge , England in 1388. Is there a particular reason you chose that setting? The book is a spinoff from The HARLOT’S DAUGHTER. It’s the story of the sister, or the harlot’s other daughter, as I like to say. I knew I did not want a large gap between the stories, so this one starts just after the epilog of the previous book. The location, however, did change. I knew I wanted Jane, my heroine, to run away disguised as a boy to study at University, but I originally planned for her to go to Oxford . As the story took shape and my research broadened to include the back-story ...

Have you ever ridden a train through the High Sierras? Through mile-long tunnels and along tracks that cling to mountainsides overlooking deep canyons? The most spectacular and dangerous routes were hacked out of solid rock, by hand, by small (110 lb), tough, energetic Chinese laborers who hauled off the earth and rock in tiny loads and, as winter approached, worked 3-shift, 24-hour days. Back in 1865 these “strange little men with their dishpan straw hats, pigtails, and floppy blue pajamas” (according to one railroad owner) proved themselves the equal of burly Irish immigrants. At first, the railroad bosses judged the Chinese too frail and unmechanical for such work. [Had they known history, of course, they might have recognized the tremendous grit and cleverness of the Chinese, exhibited in the building of the Great Wall (also hacked by hand out of mountainsides) and the invention of clocks, gunpowder, paper, ceramic glaze, etc.] The little Chinese men--actually farm boys from Cant...

My post is a wee bit late today. That's because I've been chugging away on a new book, which needs to be done... well, we won't talk about that. Every now and again, though, the great gods of research smile upon harried, desperate authors. As part of one of today's scenes, it became imperative that my characters play a game of Blind Man's Buff. As I was writing the scene, I had one of those panic attacks impossible to explain to anyone but another writer of historical fiction: the horrible fear that Blind Man's Buff might be one of those insidious Victorian additions that we blindly believe has been around longer. There are lots of those. They're sneaky little devils, those Victorian additions. My book is set in 1803. That would not have been good. I hastily looked up Blind Man's Buff (I confess, such was the extent of my deadline-driven anxiety that I did exactly what I always told my history students not to do and googled it, instead of hauling...

In the U.S., we have a long-standing tradition of "history as argument" -- our history is rarely fixed, and instead is characterized by the ongoing back-and-forth arguments we have over The Truth. It's been said that the victors write history. That may be true in the case of the American Civil War, after which many history books were modified to remove the contributions of the states that had seceded. The official school texts of my childhood made no mention of Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in the USA. Instead, I was taught that Plymoth Rock (founded a full 20 years later than the Jamestown settlement) owned that honor. (As a disclaimer of sorts, I was raised in a town barely north of the Mason Dixon line; perhaps the fighting had been particularly grim in that location). Others say it's not the victors, but the misfits who have written much of our accepted history -- those on the fringes of society, who have nothing better to do than sit...

I think it's Shelley 's 1822 death in a boating accident (not quite 30 years old! Why, oh why , didn't he let Lord Byron teach him to swim?) that lies at the root of my interest in Regency figures at the seaside. In any case, I began The Edge of Impropriety with a boating accident , and ended it with a happier trip by water. But what did they wear during that period when sailing? No point patterning anyone after Shelley: this radical, atheistical, vegetarian son of a baronet (who borrowed every penny he could against his expectations, with the aim of depleting the family holdings by the end of his life) wore threadbare shirts wherever he went and rarely bothered with neckware. The prototypical romantic poet would have been sadly out of place among the gentlemen of Regency romance -- and anyway, he seems to have mostly gone sailing with his guy friends and left Mary , Claire , Mrs. Leigh Hunt, and the rest of the ladies home with the babies. In the prologue to Edge I m...

This will be a short post because I'm juggling multiple deadlines, but I wanted to share one of the "eureka" moments I experienced during my research on Marie Antoinette. Last spring I read more than a dozen biographies of her and was surprised that very few historians or academics mention the fact that the young Austrian archduchess Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna Hapsburg von Lothringen underwent a comprehensive physical makeover to make her appearance more attractive to the French. Negotiations to wed Antonia to Louis-Auguste, the dauphin of France and grandson of King Louis XV, began in 1766 when she was only ten years old. The talks dragged on for years, not atypical for a dynastic alliance. By 1768, Antonia's mother, the Empress of Austria Maria Theresa, still had no firm commitment from Louis XV. Something had to be done to hasten the process, as Austria (with Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia eager to chew off pieces of the empire)...

A few posts ago in the comments section of Amanda's fun post on the Russian settlement of Fort Ross in California, she mentioned that she would like to hear about my Kodiak experience. It was one of the great adventures of my life and not only because of what you can see from the picture at the left. Every take-off was towards that mountain and every landing you wondered if you would stop in time. But the story begins a few months before our arrival. In the spring of 1972, six months into marriage, my husband, a junior officer in the Coast Guard, announced that his orders had been changed and we were not moving to New York City but to Kodiak, Alaska. Needless to say it took some time for this east coast girl to wrap her mind around a move that far from Fifth Avenue to a place so far west that Russia was a bigger influence than the "lower 48" Two months later, we arrived in Kodiak . Take a minute and click on this link. if you scroll around it will give you a sense of th...

I have been thinking about dark heroes lately. As a romance reader, I love them. So many romance writers write them well---I went to hear Ann Stuart speak on this topic at the RWA national meeting. She writes some spectacularly dark heroes (and I root for them even though they have done very bad things), and I searched the web for more on dark heroes. Her name, and her heroes, came up there, too. I thought what she had to say about the dark hero was so interesting and I've posted excepts from her interview (originally posted on All About Romance (see http://www.likesbooks.com/200.html )). In summary, here's what she had to say: "My heroes aren't honorable men, at least, not by conventional standards. They have their own moral code that they wouldn't break, and of course half the interest in the book is making him break that code, which is usually the one thing he holds on to. My dark heroes... tend to be lost souls, men who think they can't be redeemed, men who...

The first historic site we'll take a look at is the Mermaid Tavern on Limestone Road in Pike Creek. Located on the same side of Rt. 7 and just north of the Pike Creek Shopping Center, the Mermaid Tavern is probably the closest thing the hundred has ever had to a local meeting hall. Due to its location on a major road and very near the geographical center of the the hundred, the tavern has often been used for public purposes during its long history. Among other things, it has served as a tavern, an inn, a post office, a polling place, and a private residence. There seems to be some question as to the construction dates for the tavern, but on its National Register of Historic Places nomination form the date of 1725 is given for either the construction of the original log house or its first stone addition. Either way, there was certainly a structure here that predated the log house, as a deed dated 1718 mentions a farm and a hotel license. To those unfamiliar with the history of MCH...

I promised--or made a vague threat --to talk about eels and it seemed a natural thing to do after Shakespeare and lavender. Say Wide Sargasso Sea to me and it makes me think of eels, not Jane Eyre or the first Mrs. Rochester. That's where both European and American eels spawn in the beginning of an extremely odd life cycle of metamorposes. Eggs hatch into leaf-shaped larvae, drift to the coast, and become elvers or glass eels, and take to a fresh water habitat, swimming upstream and even traveling overland before settling into a river, growing and becoming yellow eels. They can live there for several decades before returning to the Sargasso Sea as silver eels where they embrace a salt water environment again, reproduce and die. Like so many European species, eel populations are in decline. So the harvesting of elvers, in a season that lasts only a few days (the larvae will only enter waters at the right temperature), is now rigorously controlled. Once a local delicacy, most of the...

As you’ll know if you’ve seen my Twitter updates, I spent the last week in July at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. H0me for more than a week, and I confess a good portion of my brain is still in Messina, River City, the Globe Theater, and assorted other settings from the plays we saw. I blogged about some of plays the last two weeks on my own website , and as the posts touched on story-telling and history, I thought I'd repeat them here. My good friend, fellow writer, and plotting partner Penny Williamson and I have been going to OSF together for years (that's us above at the Howard in Edinburgh, since I didn't have a scanned picture of us in Ashland). When we're not in the theater on our Ashland trips, we're usually discussing and analyzing the plays over brunch or drinks or dinner or while strolling in and out of shops. Over dinner the last night of our trip, we found ourselves discussing the heroes of two of the plays we'd seen and the transform...

This is the debut post here at The Mill Creek History Blog. Although some of this information is covered in the "About This Blog" and the "About Me" sections, I just want to go over and elaborate on a few points. First off, I am by no means a professional historian or archaeologist, no do I claim to be. I am just a born and bred MCH resident with an interest in local history. I have done some light research into some MCH sites and would like to share what I have with anyone who might be interested. I will also provide links when possible, so anyone can view the information for themselves. Since I am, as I said, an amateur, I know that I don't have all the information and that sometimes I might have incorrect information. I will always welcome input and corrections. I also welcome any suggestions for new sites to explore. In addition, if any local history-related news events should pop up, I may post on them as well. If , through this blog, I am able to connect w...

If you are traveling in Provence, you will perhaps admire the purple haze of lavender fields. Lavender (lavendula angustifolia), known as “l’herb de Provence,” is a small aromatic perennial shrub grown for use in sachets and soap and for lavender oil which is used both as a medicinal and as a perfume. Fresh, crushed, or dried the herb is used as a tea and as a stimulant, sedative, antiseptic, linen-closet freshener and moth repellant, in bathwater, to treat burns and bites; “wands” of stems can be tied in bunches and burned as incense sticks. There is even lavender-flavored lemonade. Historically, lavender (from the Latin verb “lavare,” to wash) dates from ancient times. The ancient Egyptians used it for cosmetics and for embalming; Tutankhamen’s tomb contained jars of lavender-scented unguents. The Greek philosopher Diogenes anointed his feet with lavender oil so that it “envelopes my whole body and gratefully ascends to my nose.” Lavender is mentioned in the Bible as “spikenard...

Right now, I’m working on a book in which Jane Austen appears as a recurring side character. I hadn’t originally intended to put Jane Austen in a book (that does sound a bit macabre, doesn’t it? like stuffing her into a box), but with my characters gallivanting around Bath in 1803, I eventually gave in to the inevitable. When I mentioned this to friends, the usual response, after the laughter and squealing noises, was a firm admonition not to make Jane Austen too nicey-nice. As my college roommate complained, the impulse all too often seems to be to conflate Jane Austen with the wimpier of her heroines, when, in fact, one imagined she’d the sort of person standing on the side of the Pump Room making snarky comments. It’s true. When you read Austen’s letters to her sister, there’s a wonderful, barbed humor in there, nothing like the bonnets and gloves nicety we ascribe to her simply by virtue of her posthumous reputation. All across the bookshelves of America and the UK, long-dea...

Doreen could not fit in a post today so I offered to sub for her. My original thought was to write about the history of copyright, a subject that came up in the comments section of Tracy’s post last week. Wow, did I have delusions of intellectual grandeur. You can check out this website if you are interested in the subject. http://www.asmp.org/tutorials/brief-history-copyright.html. For those not inclined to click I hope to ask a copyright attorney to sub for me sometime and he/she can tell you all about it. For the last ten days I have been on a fabulous writer’s retreat. Actually I’ve been house/dog sitting for friends. They live in the country, at the crest of a hill surrounded by woods. It’s quiet here. Really, really quiet. My only company has been two very self-sufficient dogs. There is no cell phone service but thank heaven they do have hi-speed internet access. It has been great for my writing, reading, and TV/movie addiction. To my surprise I easily lasted four days before I f...