Susan Higginbotham

I have been writing, off and on, as long as I can remember. My first stab at a historical novel was in junior high school, where I whiled away my study halls writing about the adventures of five orphaned siblings living through the Blitz. Fortunately, most of the details have escaped me, but as I recall my characters had an endless supply of money and very few relatives to get in their way. Aside from the remarks such as ‘There's a war going on, you know’ that I cleverly threw in once in a while, the characters could have just as easily been living in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in the 1970's (like me) as in London in the 1940's. But everyone has to start somewhere, eh?

In college I spent more time hanging out at the school newspaper than I did in the classroom, but I can't say the time was wasted because I got more practice at writing. After college, I worked at various clerical, secretarial, and editorial jobs before finally entering law school a tad late in life. (I used to say that I had clothes older than some of my classmates, and I wasn't off by far.)

After completing law school I worked for several years as a solo practitioner. After a few years, I was ready for a change. When I saw an ad for a job with a legal publisher that would allow me to work at home, I jumped at the opportunity. I'm still working full-time at that job today.

Who are my own favourite authors? In my idea of heaven, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Jane Austen will have each written a new novel every year or so since their deaths, and the celestial bookshelves will be sagging with their works. There'd be a new Shakespeare play to attend often as well. As for living authors, my favourites include Anne Tyler, the Rabbit novels of John Updike, and P. D. James. I'm a relative newcomer to reading historical fiction, but I've found Sharon Penman's novels to be particularly enjoyable.

One day while surfing the net, I came across an online version of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II. I'd read the play in graduate school, but when I reread it, I became absorbed in the drama itself, then intrigued by the historical background to it. I began doing research, and that's when I discovered Eleanor de Clare and her fascinating life. So fascinating, I felt compelled to write about it

In the Marlowe play, Edward II's relationship with his first favourite, Piers Gaveston, takes centre stage. Hugh le Despenser the younger (called Spencer in the play) is little more than a stand-in for Gaveston, and directors indeed often cast the same actor in both roles.

When I began researching the life of Edward II in earnest, I was surprised to learn that Gaveston had died relatively early in Edward II's twenty-year reign and that its final crisis had been precipitated by Despenser, a much more determined, ambitious, and unscrupulous character than Gaveston. I was also surprised to learn that Despenser had a wife – and that she had a story that begged to be told.

Daughter to a powerful earl and granddaughter to Edward I, Eleanor de Clare became a bride at age thirteen. She was widowed twenty years later when her hated husband was hung, drawn, beheaded, and quartered at the instigation of Edward II's estranged queen, Isabella. She was twice a prisoner in the Tower of London. Her second husband was the man who had captured her first husband and who had besieged the castle held by her eldest son. She was accused of the theft of the king's jewels – and she was likely guilty. She lost her lands, regained them, lost them again, regained them again. For several years she was the subject of a dispute in which two men each claimed to be her husband. The splendid fourteenth-century stained-glass windows in Tewkesbury Abbey, where Eleanor's relatives and husbands are buried, depict Eleanor's ancestors, brother, and husbands and are most likely Eleanor's gift – although her own burial place in the abbey is unknown.

Eleanor's occasional appearances in other historical novels seldom bear any resemblance to the actual woman. Her relationship with her husband is often portrayed as barren – yet she bore Despenser at least nine children. She is often shown as a ninny who is treated contemptuously by her husband – yet she was entrusted with the care of the queen's household and of the king's second son, appointments that would have hardly been possible without the approbation of both the king and his favourite. She is often depicted as being a spineless coward – yet within less than a year's time, she bore the violent deaths of her father-in-law, her husband, her uncle, and her daughter's father-in-law, the imprisonment of herself and her children, and the forced veiling of three of her daughters. During this period, she was landless and imprisoned, at the mercy of a hostile regime – yet she survived to rebuild her life and to give the world something of great beauty. It is this woman that The Traitor's Wife is about.

My second novel, Hugh and Bess, follows the marriage of Hugh, Eleanor's eldest son, to Elizabeth de Montacute, daughter of the Earl of Salisbury. I'm in the proofreading stage now, and if everything goes well and I figure out the formatting, it should be available online, probably through Lulu, within a few weeks. It's quite different from The Traitor's Wife, being much shorter (the sigh of relief you hear is coming from my mother) and more of a love story than anything else.