For this week's #HistFicThursdays blog, I'm delighted to be welcoming Rosemary Hayward to the blog with a guest post about her new release Strait Lace , as part of her Coffee Pot Book Club tour. Read on to discover the history surrounding this fabulous book. But first, let's meet the book... Blurb It is 1905. Edwardian England. Harriet Loxley, the daughter of a vicar and niece to a prominent Nottingham lace manufacturer, spends her days playing cricket with her brother, scouring the countryside for botanical specimens, and never missing an opportunity to argue the case for political power for women. Given the chance to visit the House of Commons, Harriet witnesses the failure of a historic bill for women’s voting rights. She also meets the formidable Pankhurst women. When Harriet gets the chance to study biology at Bedford College, London, she finds her opportunity to be at the heart of the fight. From marching in the street, to speaking to hostile c...
For today's #HistFicThursdays blog, I'm delighted to be sharing this flash fiction piece from Judith. Set in the realm of magical realism, this is a story of Ancient Greece... The Mermaid of the Aegean Thessalonike’s sigh as she awakens becomes the wind upon the waves, spiralling over the deep. The foam is her hair: the curls she inherited from her father… she still feels the water which washed them, trickling from the flask. She had laughed at how it tickled her scalp and ran into her ears as her brother poured it onto her head, his own curls bent over hers in devoted concentration. It was that memory which had propelled her from the earth and into the sea when word came of his death, casting herself into the ocean to escape a world without him. Yet she had awoken from sleep not death, her body and soul still united in the deep… and the enduring significance of that flask excruciatingly clear. Her wrath at him for destroying her death split the sea into grey ribbons, and her s...