What is interesting to me as a historian is how the fortunes of every family reflect in their small way the fortunes of the nation. We are all the products of both national and family history. What is interesting to me as a feminist is how these fortunes are so often invisibly guided by women. What is interesting to me as a novelist is whether it is possible to tell a fictional story which tells a historical truth: what the world and the nation were like at the time, what the individuals were thinking, doing, and feeling, and how change comes about for them all.

This is a big ambition, and it’s going to be, I hope, a big series, starting with this novel set in an obscure and isolated area of England during the English Civil War, tracing the family through the Restoration, through enlightenment, and empire. I don’t know how far my family will travel nor do I know when their story will end. I don’t know how many books I will write nor in how many countries they will make a home. But I do know that when I write about ordinary people rather than royals, the story at once becomes more surprising; and when I write about women, I am engaging with a history which is almost always untold.

Between writing the novels for this series I am working on a history of women in England. My interest has moved from the individual women of the court to the millions of women of town and country. I am finding women written off by previous historians as “ordinary,” whose experiences are obscured by time and lost to history—widely regarded as not worth recording in the first place. But these are our foremothers—interesting to us for that reason alone. These are women making the nation, just as much as their more visible better-recorded fathers, brothers, and sons. Thinking like this about women’s history has led me inevitably to want to write a different sort of historical fiction—the fiction of an unwritten history.

Many fine writers have taken the leap into the unknown to fictionalize little-known history. Ann Baer’s Down the Common is a particularly interesting example: a fictional account of a working woman who would usually not make the archive, and so not enter history, and so leave no trace for the novelist to animate. Very helpful for the Isle of Wight section of this story was Jan Toms’s To Serve Two Masters: Colonel Robert Hammond, the King’s Gaoler, which is a splendid example of local detailed history that adds so much to the national story. I drew my account of Charles and his trial mostly from two great biographies: D. R. Watson’s The Life and Times of Charles I and Charles Carlton’s Charles I: The Personal Monarch, as well as his poignant Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638–1651. For general history I consulted, among many others, Robert Ashton’s The English Civil War: Conservatism and Revolution, 1603–1649. Lucy Moore’s Lady Fanshawe’s Receipt Book: The Life and Times of a Civil War Heroine was inspiring both for the recipes and for the history of a woman, like James’s mother, who went into exile with the royal family. Of course, I read many more books than these titles; and I am grateful to the very many fine historians, and to the staff of West Sussex Records office for their welcome and for the care they take of their local maps and documents. Among these was some fine research from local history groups, a reminder of the importance of libraries and local adult education.