Catherine Kullmann
Mar 7, 2019 | Historical
I am delighted to announce the upcoming release in June 2019 of The Duke's Regret, Book Three of The Duchess of Gracechurch Trilogy. Readers of The Murmur of Masks and Perception & Illusion will remember Flora, the charming young Duchess of Gracechurch, who befriends Olivia and later Lallie and other young wives whose ‘husbands are distant’. Flora and her husband Jeffrey also have a distant marriage and I began to wonder what would happen if one of them wanted to change this. The result is my new short novel, The Duke’s Regret.
Set in Regency England from 1803 to 1816, The Duchess of Gracechurch Trilogy celebrates friendship, family and love.
Wed before she was seventeen in a made match to a duke’s heir, heiress Flora Hassard quickly learns that her new husband has very little interest in getting to know his new wife. Supported by her mother-in-law, she creates a happy home for herself and her children while ‘donning the Duchess’ in a society where she uses her position and influence in the ton to befriend young wives “whose husbands are, well, distant, shall we say? They are safe in that circle, or as safe as they want to be. The older women keep an eye out for the younger ones, warn them of the worst rakes, that sort of thing; keep them out of harm’s way” (Perception & Illusion). Flora is content, but her contentment has come at a high price—she has had to turn her back on love.
Books One, The Murmur of Masks and Two, Perception & Illusion tell the stories of two of the brides Flora befriends while in Book Three Flora herself takes the lead.
About The Duke's Regret: A chance meeting with a bereaved father makes Jeffrey, Duke of Gracechurch realise how hollow his own marriage and family life are. Persuaded to marry at a young age, he and his Duchess, Flora, live largely separate lives. Now he is determined to make amends to his wife and children and forge new relationships with them.
But Flora is appalled by his suggestion. Her thoughts already turn to the future, when the children will have gone their own ways. She knows divorce is out of the question, as it would mean social ruin, but an amicable separation might be possible and perhaps even a discreet liaison once pregnancy is no longer a risk.
Can Jeffrey convince his wife of his sincerity and break down the barriers between them? Flora must decide if she will hazard her heart and her hard-won tranquillity when the prize is unforeseen happiness.
While The Murmur of Masks and Perception & Illusion, can be read in either order without fear of spoilers, The Duke’s Regret contains spoilers for the first two books and should be read last. If you have not already done so, now is the time to read the first two books. They are available as eBooks and paperbacks and are free on Kindle Unlimited.
Feb 19, 2019 | Editors' Blog, Historical
The Regency Act was passed in January 1811 and on 6 February the Prince of Wales was appointed Prince Regent in place of his father King George III, swearing to be ‘faithful and bear true allegiance’ to the king, to maintain ‘the safety, honour and dignity’ of the king and ‘the welfare of his people’ and to uphold the Protestant religion. Although prior to this the Prince had supported the oppositional Whigs, to their disappointment and disgust he now insisted on ‘maintaining his father’s cabinet,” as the Whig MP, Thomas Creevey put it.
Although the King’s health continued to deteriorate, to the extent that on 12 July Creevey wrote that that he was expected to die before 22 August, the day on which Parliament was supposed to resume sitting, the Regent’s main efforts in the first six months of his tenure appear to have been focussed on the magnificent midsummer fête he held at his residence Carlton House on 19 June. About two thousand guests were invited to this sumptuous feast, where a real stream purled between floral banks down the length of the main table, affording those privileged to sit there with glimpses of the silver and gold fish that swam therein.
So keen was he to display this magnificence that for three days afterwards, tickets were issued permitting visitors to visit Carlton House On the final day some thirty-thousand availed themselves of this privilege.
The Blue Velvet Room, Carlton House 1816
Conspicuously absent from these festivities was the Regent’s wife, the Princess of Wales. If ever there was a match made in hell, it was theirs. Bribed by the promise of having his personal debts of £630,000 (roughly £48 million today) repaid, in April 1795 the then Prince of Wales married his cousin Caroline, daughter of the Duke of Brunswick. The couple met for the first time on their wedding day and the Prince’s reported response to the sight of his bride was “Harris, I am not well. Pray to get me a glass of brandy.”
They had already separated before the birth in January 1796 of their only child, Princess Charlotte. In 1811 the princess lived with her mother at Kensington. In November 1811 however, the Prince Regent is recorded as leading off the dance with his daughter at a party given by the Duchess of York at Oatlands. According to the Morning Chronicle, he ‘gave his leg a twist and sprained his ankle’ while dancing. This injury required him to recuperate at Oatlands for almost a month. Nobody believed in the sprain; the most popular story being that he had grossly insulted Lady Yarmouth at the ball and been soundly thrashed by her husband.
The Bed-Ridden Prince with Two Black Eyes
At the same time, there was unrest among the working classes, in particular among the textile workers of Nottingham many of whom had lost their employment, partly because of a decrease in demand and partly due to the introduction of labour-saving automated looms and knitting machines. Claiming to be following orders from a ‘General Ludd’, called after an apprentice, Ned Ludd, who was alleged to have wrecked a machine some decades before, In November 1811 the Luddites embarked on a campaign of intimidation and machine breaking that was to last for over a year and see dozens hanged or transported to Australia.
But just as the protestors were unsuccessful in blocking the march of technology, so were the authorities unable to prevent workers from continuing to fight for better pay and working conditions. Although it would take a century, eventually Labour would replace the Whigs (by then known as the Liberals) as one of the two major parties in the UK parliament.
Sense and Sensibility: Willoughby and Marianne
One significant event in 1811 passed without fanfares of any sort. In June, Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra, “No, indeed, I am never too busy to think of S&S. I can no more forget it than a mother can her sucking child; & I am obliged to you for your enquiries. I have had two sheets to correct, but the last only brings us to W.s first appearance.”
In fact, it was to be October before Sense and Sensibility was published, introducing to readers the author we associate most with the Regency era.
On the continent, the French and allied troops warred in Spain, here a victory and there a defeat, with the year ending in a stalemate.
Meanwhile, in Paris, Napoleon’s second wife, the Empress Marie-Louise, gave birth to his long-desired son, Napoleon François Charles Joseph Bonaparte who was given the title of King of Rome.
FIND OUT MORE ABOUT CATHERINE KULLMAN HERE.
Barbara Spencer
Jan 23, 2019 | Fantasy, Historical
My writing career has been full of contradictions and topsy-turvy decisions. I mean who, in their right mind, with twelve books under their belt, 5 of which were mystery-thrillers for teens, decides to change both genres and age of readers?
I do!
I now write magical realism for adults and top teens.
Even worse who publishes Book 4 before Book 1? Guilty as charged.
Read on!
The idea for the series began in 2010, when I took my granddaughter to Amsterdam to celebrate the publication of another novel, Running. The storyline for that took three years to evolve, and it wouldn’t have happened then if I hadn’t dropped into the local garage and spotted a Suzuki 1000cc motorbike.
There are so many strings that led to the writing of The Year the Swans Came and the trilogy Children of Zeus, (Publication: April 2019) In Holland, we visited a tiny village set on an even smaller island, the passageways between houses were no wider than rat runs. We explored canals and alleyways; saw furniture being lofted up the outside of a house because its internal stairs were too narrow, dawdled over old bridges, visited flower markets and ate cream cakes. We saw the Anne Frank House where we learned about the plight of the Jews in the war, and the crippling starvation meted out to citizens. We also visited museums where scenes of windswept barques dominated, and I noticed a painting of Zeus, dating from 1610. Lastly, I read the myth of the Angels of Mons.
Oh yes, and my favourite book is Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier which is set in 17th century Delft.
So what is the Year the Swans Came really about?
This is the review from Catherine Kullmann who explains it far better than I ever could:
As Maidy Bader anxiously awaits her sixteenth birthday, the day on which ‘overnight girls become adults, eligible to be courted, and to marry’ her thoughts return to the past, and most importantly, to her elder brother Pieter’s sixteenth birthday, the last he spent with his family. No one speaks of him or why he vanished. Life goes on as it always did in the unnamed country. The unnamed invaders have left and those deportees who could, have returned. Among them are the Bader’s neighbours, the Endelbaums. Their beautiful daughter Ruth, who is Maidy’s best friend, has had to give up her hopes of marrying Pieter. Slightly older than Maidy, Ruth is the belle of the college the girls attend while Maidy stays more in the background.
On Maidy’s birthday, everything changes. Maidy begins to emerge from her chrysalis. Pieter returns as suddenly as he departed but gives no explanation for his long absence. Ruth immediately claims him, but she is also intrigued by the four strangers, handsome young men, who suddenly appear at the college. She takes their attention and interest as her due but Maidy is surprised to find herself sought out both by gentle Jaan and the strangers’ leader, the charismatic and mysterious Zande. And Pieter is desperate to marry Ruth and complete his apprenticeship with his father, a maker of mirrors.
But all is not as it seems. This is not a college romance. Unimaginable secrets swirl beneath the surface of daily life and all too soon the unwitting Maidy and Ruth are drawn into the vortex of an ancient tragedy that threatens them all anew.
I was blown away by this book, enthralled by the beautiful writing, the slow build-up of the mesmerizing story and the wonderful characters. Magical realism of the highest order.
Catherine is quite correct, both the country and the invaders remain unnamed. The country is Holland and the city Amsterdam. If you pick up a copy of the novel, you will discover a map. Compare it with Amsterdam and you will see it is skewed – welcome to magical realism.
So why is Book 4 now Book 1?
That was the decision of Katie Bowes, a New Zealand author. She said, ‘After reading, Swans, everyone will want to know about how Zande got to be Zande.’
So read The Year the Swans Came and then the trilogy, Children of Zeus, when all will be revealed. By which time, with luck, I will have completed Book 5 which brings it all to a conclusion.
Catherine Kullmann
Jan 18, 2019 | Featured, Historical
I write Regency novels. This is shorthand for saying I write historical novels set in England in the second decade of the nineteenth century, a time of unprecedented change that continues to affect our modern lives. In this series of blogs, we will look behind the scenes to discover what makes this decade tick. What makes it so fascinating to us, two hundred years later?
Let us start with a snapshot of the UK on 31 December 1810. All was not well in the island kingdom. Having lapsed in and out of insanity for over two decades, King George III, sober paterfamilias, was finally deemed incapable of undertaking any affairs of state. Preparations were set in train to appoint as Regent his eldest son and heir, the affable, extravagant and adulterous Prince of Wales.
The country had been at war with France since 1803. Across the English Channel, the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte had consolidated his hold on the European Continent; his sphere of influence extending west across the Iberian Peninsula, north into Sweden where one of his generals, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, had been elected crown prince, and eastwards through modern Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary and Poland to the borders of the Russian and Ottoman Empires. The only ray of light was provided by Lord Wellington whose Peninsular army was driving that of the French General Massena out of Portugal and into Spain.
Back at home, the bulk of wealth, power and influence lay in the hands of the aristocracy and landed gentry who also controlled the established Church of England, the universities and the military and legal professions. In a study carried out two years later, in 1812, these classes made up 7.8% of families in Great Britain and Ireland but received 40.19% of the total annual income generated therein. Unsurprisingly, they resisted any attempts to reform a system that worked well for them but not so well for the rest of the country.
Apart from formal Court dress which remained unchanged as long as the elderly Queen Charlotte lived, the vast skirts and cumbersome hoops of the previous century had yielded to the classical styles copied from revolutionary and imperial France while gentlemen had abandoned their silks and brocades for boots, buckskin breeches and riding coats.
Did these lighter, looser clothes lead to a lighter, looser way of life? The Regency was certainly one of the great party decades. Perhaps this was due to the shift in the dates of the London Season, the months that the upper classes spent in London while Parliament was sitting. Every peer had a seat in the House of Lords and where the noble families led, others followed. During the 18th century, Parliament had sat from November to May. From 1806 onwards, the opening of Parliament veered towards February and the session extended into July or even August. This change from winter to spring/summer Season with its warmer and brighter days provided many more opportunities for entertainment and dalliance. The Season was the great ‘marriage market' when eligible young ladies of good birth and varying fortunes sought to find a suitable husband. The night was turned into day. Eight p.m. was the fashionable dinner hour, after which both sexes flocked to the theatres, balls, assemblies and routs while gentlemen also had their clubs and the dubious establishments of the demi-monde – gaming hells and brothels for the most part. The social round continued into the small hours and resumed the next day with ‘morning calls' i.e. visits which were made between noon and three p.m.. A ‘breakfast' at three o'clock might be followed by a ride or drive in Hyde Park at the fashionable hour and soon it was time for dinner again.
I hope you will join me in exploring the Regency world over the coming months.
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Catherine Kullmann was born and educated in Dublin. Following a three-year courtship conducted mostly by letter, she moved to Germany where she lived for twenty-five years before returning to Ireland. She has worked in the Irish and New Zealand public services and in the private sector. She is married and has three adult sons and two grandchildren.
Catherine has always been interested in the extended Regency period, a time when the foundations of our modern world were laid. She loves writing and is particularly interested in what happens after the first happy end—how life goes on for the protagonists and sometimes catches up with them. Her books are set against a background of the offstage, Napoleonic wars and consider in particular the situation of women trapped in a patriarchal society. She is the author of The Murmur of Masks, short-listed for the 2017 CAP Awards (Carousel Aware Prize for Independent Authors), Perception & Illusion and A Suggestion of Scandal, shortlisted for BooksGoSocial Best Indie Book 2018.
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A review of one of Catherine's books.
Oct 8, 2018 | Editors' Blog, Historical, Literary
This book is fiction. The story that inspired it was not.
In 1990, I came into possession of two documents which were fascinating, and in their own way, quite savage.
My father had been brought up on a small farm in County Mayo in the West of Ireland. Following the death of one of his brothers, he gave us a box of documents which, by their dates, had been stored for over a hundred years. They included a lease, a number of letters and two payrolls from the 1840s.
It was with a sense of shock that I realized what they really were. These were the documentary evidence of the Great Irish Famine in East Mayo. They were also the confirmation of the stories I had learned as a child as to how my family survived the Famine.
The two payrolls were the most horrific. They detailed the wages for gangs of men, women, and children working on two roads in east Mayo in the winter of 1846. The desperately low rates of pay – as low as three pennies a day – proved that this was Famine Relief. Local research filled in more of the story, a brutal one of hunger, fever, and death.
The Irish Famine had started with the partial failure of the potato crop in the autumn of 1845. In 1846 the potato failed again, and this time the failure was nearly total.
The Workhouses could not cope, and so the enormous Famine Relief schemes were started, and kept running through the coldest and worst winter of the past 300 years. Hundreds of thousands of starving people were employed on roadworks, building and repairing roads all across Ireland.
Hunger killed thousands of them. The murderous blizzard of December 1846 killed many thousands more and brought the Works to a halt all across the country. But they opened again in January 1847, and the arctic cold went on. By the time the soup kitchens took over in March, the Works were employing three-quarters of a million survivors, mostly in the West of Ireland, all trying desperately to feed their families on pitifully low wages. Then, as the winter receded, a vicious fever epidemic killed hundreds of thousands of people right across Ireland. 1846 was shocking, but Black ’47 would never be forgotten.
Research also confirmed an old family tradition which I had never believed. This was the story of an utterly impossible love set against the terror of the times. So in the end ‘The Killing Snows’ is much more than historical fiction. It is an attempt to understand how such a love could have happened and how the impossible became true.
Charles Egan
Sep 25, 2018 | Editors' Blog, Historical
As part of my research into the early life of Constantine the Great, for my novel about his rise to power, The Sign of the Blood, I read widely both from my own collection of books, some of which you can see below and at the library of Trinity College, Dublin.
The Sign of the Blood is a fictional account of what it must have taken to secure power as emperor of the west in 306 A.D. in Britannia after Constantine's father died. The novel speculates on relationships and on the influences from both real and imaginary characters, including his father, mother, and stepmother.
The question I asked myself in 2001, when I started this novel, was what happened that July when Constantine came to power?
We have almost no detail from the historical record of the death of Constantine's the Great's father in York (Eboracum) that summer. In Professor Michael Grant's book, The Emperor Constantine (Weidenfield & Nicholson, Pg 23) we get a single sentence fragment: “…since he did die only a short time after his son's arrival.”
The question I asked myself was: “could there be more behind the coincidence of his father's death, than simply that he was ill?”
That question is unanswered in other respected accounts of the life of Constantine. For instance in Professor Timothy Barnes' “fullest available narrative history of the ..reign of Constantine,” (back cover) we get this on Pg 27, “On 25 July 306 at York, Constantius died with the children of both his marriages in attendance.” This account relies on the discredit Eusebius, who Barnes in his preface to the book I took this quote from, Constantine & Eusebius, (Harvard University Press), describes Eusebius as, “circumscribed by both his prejudices and his sources.”
Perhaps if we look to original sources we might find something closer to the truth. In From Constantine to Julian, Pagan and Byzantine Views, (Routledge) I found the Origo Constantini, a narrative of the life of Constantine probably written soon after his death in 337 (see Pg 42. for that) On page 43 this single sentence provides little further illumination: “After his victory over the Picts, his father Constantius dies at York and Constantine, by the will of all the soldiers, was made Caesar.”
And that's it. We hear nothing about his father's last days, what he made of his son after his prolonged absence in the east and how Constantine secured the support of all the soldiers on his father's death. Here are just some of the influences I have spotted on the events of that July. You may see more.
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- How did Constantine feel about having been a virtual hostage for his father's good behavior since his father's elevation in 293? I am sure it helped his education, but it was not a position many would envy.
- What did Constantine make of being passed over as successor a year before on the 1st May, 305? He would have expected to be appointed to be his father's successor, but another was appointed in his place by Diocletian on his retirement. It is well known that failed aspirants to a throne were likely candidates for an early death.
- What did Constantine's stepmother, Theodora, make of the return of Constantine to her husband's court? In particular, how did she see this impacting the succession of her own young sons with the emperor, Dalmatius and Julius?
These three questions alone provide ample scope for an author looking to explore what may have happened that summer. I think we can agree that it was audacious for Constantine to claim the succession on his father's death. To do so must have meant that he had wide support at his father's court. How that came about within months of his arrival in the west intrigues me.
I hope it intrigues you too.
I'd appreciate your comments on all of this below, The novel will be published in late November 2018. It is part of a planned trilogy. The second novel will be titled The Battle, and will be about the lead up to and aftermath to the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, when Constantine solidified his grip on the entire Roman empire.
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Laurence O'Bryan is the author of three novels published by Harper Collins, beginning with The Istanbul Puzzle. You can find that here. he self-published two further novels in the series and got a liking for self-publishing while adopting the critical techniques, specifically multiple professional edits, used by traditional publishers.
