Spring 2007

At last…I have just come to the end of the first draft of The Book of Hours which, for me, is always the worst time in the writing process. However, I cannot pretend it has all been hard graft. For one thing, I took a trip to Italy to look at the landscapes, architecture and painting. Purely for research purposes of course! It is a hard life, and someone has to do it. I find my subject matter absolutely fascinating and, since returning from Italy, I have been immersed in accounts of medieval Umbrian saints and a surprising amount of saints came from Umbria. I was particularly interested – as this forms part of the back story of the novel – as to why holy women in the fourteenth century often starved themselves. There are many reasons not least that, in age when women did not have power over their lives, regulating their food intake was a way of asserting it. But it was also an era when many, impassioned believers wished to imitate Christ’s sufferings as closely as possible and so they decided to endure privations of a kind that makes me gasp.

Meanwhile, the preparations for the paperback publication of Wives Behaving Badly have been going apace. Viking Penguin have re-orchestrated the jacket in a fresh and eye-catching way and my lovely new editor tells me that it will be included in Summer Reading Roundups and I will doing some radio interviews from the UK. I shall miss touring the US this year, and really hope I am invited back next year but the extra time will be useful…

Which means there is no excuse for not finishing The Book of Hours!

© Elizabeth Buchan