I am still musing on what to write next. Summer is a good time to reflect, and the grandchildren are a delightful distraction.
I’d love to write about the amazing changes to the way we live at home over the last hundred years, but am still struggling to order the infinite amount of fascinating material. I want it to combine the technological changes with the clever thinking of a succession of women who really do deserve the title of domestic goddesses.
A quest for the truth about the eccentric and independently-minded Victorian poultry expert, Barbara Erlington Arbuthnott, who is still known in Norway as 'the uncrowned queen of Sunndalen'. The only biography of her was written in Norwegian fifty years ago by my father, the author Eiliv Odde Hauge. In June I visited Sunndalen and discovered that his visits there were still remembered, and a riotous musical based on his book has been playing to packed houses at the annual Cultural Festival for the last ten years. But how much of what he wrote was truth, and how much was fiction?
Or I might go back to the Middle Ages with
The parallel lives of the two queens of the Wars of the Roses - Lancaster’s Margaret of Anjou and York’s Elizabeth Woodville. Margaret was niece to the King of France, coming to England when she was barely 16. She fought valiantly for the right of her husband and their only son to the English crown, establishing a court in exile, plotted against the Yorkists for a decade and succeeded in winning back the throne for her husband – albeit only for 18 months. Elizabeth, originally married to a Lancastrian knight by whom she had two sons, served for a while as her lady in waiting. Her secret marriage to the Yorkist Edward IV – nearly ten years her junior – shocked both England and Europe, but it lasted over twenty years.
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