Susan Leona Fisher, author of historical & contemporary romance - Blog

May 2019 - visits that inspired a story-line

4/29/2019

If historical research provides story themes, visiting places can inspire a setting and add that touch of authenticity. Looking back at my story-lines over the past 10 years, here are some that were born following a particular visit:

Carlo Gatti’s ice wells at the London Canal Museum near King’s Cross led to my exploring just how ice-cream was made before the advent of modern refrigeration and the early development of refrigerated ships. So was born ROSE GLACE, CONFECTIONER TO A DUKE, about an orphaned young girl who makes a new life for herself as an ice-cream maker, and encounters a self-make businessman who runs a shipping line and is looking to inherit a dukedom. (a finalist for historical romance in the EPIC awards 2016)

Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire was my model for the cotton-spinning mill that features in A MASTER OF INDUSTRY, except my version isn’t run quite as well and provides the opening scene of the story when the heroine (a feisty governess) confronts the earl on whose land the mill operates about some pretty telling health and safety issues!

The Gladstone Pottery Museum, Stoke-on-Trent put on a special exhibition of the history of the toilet and inspired IN FOR A PENNY, in which the heroine is the daughter of a sanitary engineer. Then there’s the ne’er-do-well younger son of a duke who needs reforming, a philandering viscount after a new mistress, and a good dollop of society scandal. Quite a raunchy tale.

April 2019 - Creating a plot

4/7/2019

A friend recently asked me where I got ideas for the plots of my books. Usually it’s been a single fact/event that grabs my attention when researching a particular period and then that seed germinates and grows. I began, 10 years ago, with attempts at contemporary romantic fiction, but wanted to avoid the instant communication of modern technology so checked out the 1980s. 1987 stood out as a year when so many terrible events happened that I wove them into ‘The Year I found Great Aunt Alice’ as the context against which the heroine compares her great aunt’s experiences in both world wars.

I then researched the 2nd Boer War, including the records of the British Red Cross, where something caught my eye. One of the volunteer doctors (referred to as ‘civil surgeons’) was listed as ‘missing’ at the end of the conflict. Did he die? Probably, but I imagined a scenario in which he actually survived, but there was a reason why he needed to hide away, for his own safety. After various attempts that finally turned into ‘Miss Deacon investigates’, about a British woman sent to France in 1918 to investigate the behaviour of the WAACs on the Western Front and coming across the mystery of the missing doctor, which she uncovers by talking to various ‘witnesses’ of the time

After that I got into Victorian events such as the Baccarat scandal at Tranby Croft (the context for ‘Fair Play and Foul’) and the Cleveland Street scandal (‘Heiress to a Duke’). More recently I’ve gone back in time to the Regency period, post Waterloo. The inspiration for the first of these, ‘A Master of Speculation’ was the real involvement of some radical British aristocrats in helping one of Napoleon’s former marshals (Lavalette) escape from France after his wife had daringly visited him in prison the night before his execution and swapped places with him.

The real events provide the inspiration but I then play with them, ask ‘what if…?’ and create my own version and my own characters to fit in with the rest of the romantic tale.

A taste of Victorian intrigue

3/19/2019

Someone once wrote that a happy ending is where you choose to stop the story. The implication is that it cannot be happy ever after (though don’t we all love the idea!), or certainly not for everyone.

Thinking about this led me to consider the unhappy circumstances of one of my minor characters in my Regency Master Series, Lady Elizabeth Allgreave. That turned into “Her Secret Benefactor” which has proved so popular (thank you readers!) that I’ve applied a similar approach for another new story.

If you read “A Master of Speculation” (first in the Regency Master Series) you may recall Elizabeth Morgan, former governess, then maid, then outcast, who is saved by an offer of marriage from Robert Denison, the hero’s former naval colleague and now his estate manager. He will give Elizabeth’s unborn child his name.

“Her Secret Commission” tells that child’s story. She is Joanna, who at seventeen discovers the truth of her origins and, in anger and shame, runs away from home. We meet her some years later, aged twenty-eight, caught up in the world of espionage and coming to the unwelcome attention of the police, in the form of the rather handsome Detective Inspector Matthew Harcourt.

OUT NOW FOR KINDLE AND KDP SELECT!

March 2019

3/12/2019

Jewish Book Week 2019 has just drawn to a close and I was privileged to attend the inspiring appearance of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch at King’s Place, where she repeated (in English) her address of last year to the German Bundestag describing her early life and her survival in Auschwitz and the role of her cello-playing in that story.
By chance, on the train to London that weekend (not knowing that we were due to attend that event) I read, almost at a sitting, “A Woman of War”. This is a first novel by Mandy Robotham. It seemed to me to be very well researched and the lead character, a midwife caught helping Jewish women give birth, felt very authentic. It is fiction, but so cleverly woven into the factual history of the time, one could almost believe it could have happened. Highly recommended.

February 2019: newly available books for KDP Select

1/31/2019

ROSE GLACE: Confectioner to a Duke
Now available for the first time in KDP Select. If you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited or the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library you can read for free! This popular rags-to-riches tale was a finalist in the EPIC awards 2016 and follows the fortunes of orphan Rose Turner and self-made businessman George Kemble, heir to the Duke of Fairleigh.
Also coming to KDP Select are three other titles:
*THE BARONET’S DAUGHTER, an Edwardian romance set in the Boer War
*THE ADVENTURES OF JANE WATERFORD, a Cinderella tale set in the 1890s
*THE GIRL BACK HOME, a World War 2 romance
Yours to enjoy at the press of a button. All 4 also available to buy on Kindle at the new lower price of 99p/99c each.

Author talk about Violet Douglas Pennant

1/20/2019

2pm on Wednesday 23 January 2019, Settle Community Library, Susan Leona Fisher will talk about the life and career of Violet Douglas Pennant, how she discovered and investigated this lady's dismissal from the Women's Royal Air Force in 1918 and how she came to write the biography. All welcome.

January 2019 : NEW Regency Romance

1/1/2019

NEW YEAR GREETINGS TO FELLOW READERS & AUTHORS!

Remember Lady Elizabeth Allgreave? She appeared briefly in “A Master of Industry”, when Lady Somerton paraded the young heiress before her son as a potential marriage partner. As you’ll know if you read the book, Lord Somerton had other plans. But I rather wondered about the cool and controlled Lady Elizabeth. What had made her like that? Who might thaw her out?
So here is her story for you to enjoy.
“Her Secret Benefactor”, available now on Amazon Kindle and in print from Amazon books.

December 2018

11/30/2018

Thomas Spence, the poor man’s advocate
In my latest regency romance (to be published in January 2019), the hero has become an officer and a gentleman after humble beginnings as a child worker in a coal mine. A significant factor in his transformation occurs when he runs away from home and on the road meets one Thomas Spence, who persuades him he can become whoever he wants to be. The meeting is entirely fictitious, but Thomas Spence was real and I was fascinated by what I found when researching his life of poverty and pamphlets - oh, and coins! As long ago as 1775 he wrote a paper which he delivered to the Philosophical Society in Newcastle, his home city. It was entitled “The Real Rights of Man” (he is alleged to have used the phrase long before Thomas Paine) and spoke of common ownership of land. After his death in 1814, his followers set up the Society of Spencean Philanthropists, but their activities were more revolutionary that philanthropic and it quickly became a banned organisation in that period after 1815 when Lord Liverpool as PM and Lord Sidmouth as Home Secretary steered through a number of repressive pieces of legislation.
The Philosophical Society is still open for business and well worth a visit, just along from Newcastle train station.

November 2018 - your views on Violet Douglas Pennant

11/10/2018

Thank you to readers who have taken the trouble to send me comments on “The rise and fall of Violet Douglas Pennant”, which I’m delighted to say has been well received by many.
Here are a selection:

The research is impeccable and the assessment of it is fair-minded.
I can’t put it down.
The subject matter is compelling but you have also helped with the pace in the way you have approached it all.
I found it totally absorbing, really enjoyed it, notwithstanding the feelings of outrage and frustration at what happened to Violet.
I loved how each chapter gives a sense of atmosphere and of the times, very nice domestic details which bring it to life. Not a dry old biography at all!
Impressed with the depth and detail of your research too.
I don’t usually go for historical novels but the story had enough suspense to keep me engaged and I enjoyed it. I guess it opened my eyes a bit because I’d never really taken any interest in that wealthy strata of society where everything was/is about who you know.
I had some difficulty in associating with Violet’s need to clear her name or understanding the drive with which she pursued that over such a long period. Didn’t you get frustrated when you were researching and writing that she wouldn’t let it go and put her energy into making a new life for herself?
It can’t have been an easy time in the first world war to be able, female and not allowed to do the job properly!
Her letter to Lloyd George was far too long, but I think that if these or similar events had happened today, she would have been able to employ a solicitor expert in employment law, who would have made mincemeat of Lord Weir!
Thank you for shedding so much light on what seems to have been a shambolic, chaotic and really not very nice period of history at the end of WW1. I thought the parallel with the Dreyfuss Case in France was so appropriate, and, in today’s world, there are also lessons which can and should be applied.

If you have any feedback on this or my fictional novels, there is now an email address specially for readers: SLFisher.Readers@btconnect.com
Would love to hear from you and will do my best to reply.
NB I will not use any reader email addresses so acquired for anything else, or pass them on.

September 2018 - a picture speaks 1,000 words

9/17/2018

My thanks to everyone who has responded so positively to the launch of “The rise and fall of Violet Douglas Pennant”, especially if you bought it. Now there’s a free PDF to accompany the book. Download “vdp_illustrated.pdf” to see over 100 people and 30 places mentioned in the book, set out chapter by chapter. Find it on the HOME page of this website, www.SLFisherAuthor.co.uk and click “Download File” (file size c8MB)