My first novel, Revelations of a Spanish Infanta (below) This novel is about the court of Philip the IV in Spain in the 1650s. It features the artist Diego Velazquez, dwarfs, the future queen of France, Maria Teresa, and a fair few completely fictional characters too. I’d classify it as magical romance.
My second novel, We Too Shall Be Mothers (below) This novel is a poetic romp through the French revolution from a female perspective. I saw the image of the nun that features on the cover image (it is a 1791 engraving) in a book on women’s history and decided to write a hypothetical story of such a woman. The story is set in Avignon and Vienna and features the music of Mozart, Cherubino from The Marriage of Figaro, the bridge of Avignon, an underwater almshospital, a coach ride across Europe.
My third novel, A Woman of Seville (below) This novel features the artist Diego Velazquez again, but this time set when he was a young man of 16. It is another romance; very literary and poetic though, and much of it told from a female perspective.
Readers often want to know if the ladder-men fraternity are factual or fictional. There is a lot of factual material which informs the fiction in the novel but in the case of the ladder-man, and the ladder-men — the league of rooftop workers — these persons are entirely an invention of my own making. As far as I know, no such man or men ever existed in Seville or anywhere, but I’m sure you could find a historical precedent if you looked hard enough. When I visited Seville I got an impression of how important los terradas and los terrazas were to the inhabitants. The ladder-man is born from the rooftops of Seville, so to speak. To write my novels I always need to visit the towns I am writing about to get inspiration and feel intimate with the historical past.
See online review of A Woman of Seville taken from The Age newspaper. Go to the following link below:
My collection of poetry, The Fable of Arachne (below). I don’t write poetry any more, but I enjoy reading it. These poems were written during the time I was pregnant or bringing up small children, a long time back now. Hence their intensity and preoccupation. See my Motherhood poems page on this wordpress site for some examples of these poems. There is also a poem about Diego Velazquez, which I wrote after seeing some of his paintings in the Louvre in Paris. This poem started a series of writings, and travels, in which his paintings are a direct inspiration.
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