I was delighted to be the guest on Kelly Schuknecht's blog (Helping Authors Succeed) this week to talk about my writing and my latest Andaman Press book, The Lotus House. You can read the full interview here, I've included part of it below and added some photos for good measure.
What literary pilgrimages have you gone on?
My mum loved Dickens and would read his stories to me at bedtime when I was a child. We lived in a tiny village in Northamptonshire (Pury End) and the local market town, Towcester, was a stopping point for Mr Pickwick in Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers. There was a Pickwick restaurant there and a Pickwick bakery too where we used to buy cakes on Saturdays - the most delicious kind of literary pilgrimage!
The Dickens theme continued when I started my legal training in a law firm housed in a creaky old house at 28, Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London. The atmosphere of the building and the surrounding streets and alleys was straight out of a Dickens novel.
It was no surprise that Bleak House was set a few doors down.
At lunchtimes I would sometimes join other literary pilgrims to admire a quirky old building, The Old Curiosity Shop, on the bottom corner of the fields.
When I got married in 1990, we went to India for our honeymoon, and, inspired by Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, and the TV series Jewel in the Crown, stayed for a few days at the fabulous and atmospheric Lake Palace Hotel in Udaipur where part of the series was filmed. That in turn inspired me to write The Lake Palace over 30 years later -although (confusingly I admit) my book is set in another palace on a lake, in a fictional princely state and based on Neermahal the largest water palace in India, in Tripura, over 2000 km away from Udaipur.
We also visited Amber Fort, used in the filming of the film version of MM Kaye's The Far Pavilions, another favourite novel.
My husband’s family hail from the Isle of Wight and we lived there for a couple of years while my three sons were small, and we often go back. The Dickens theme resurfaced when we discovered a large house in Bonchurch near Ventnor (Winterbourne House) which Dickens rented for his family one summer.
The Isle of Wight is steeped in literary connections – Alfred, Lord Tennyson made his home at Freshwater where we often walk on Tennyson Down to admire the far-reaching views.
Last but not least, I now live quite close to Alton in Hampshire, where Jane Austen lived for the last eight years of her life. We sometimes drive over to the village of Chawton to have lunch opposite her cottage and walk in the fields and lanes that must have inspired her writing.
Read the rest of the interview here
For more information about my books, see my website or my Amazon author page.
Thanks for reading!
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