Clare McHugh's Blog

If you're like me you're excited by Thomas Cromwell (aka actor Mark Rylance) coming back to PBS, tomorrow at 9. Here's something I wrote about the real man for the BBC---
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/2...

This week I have been absorbed reading a terrific new Biography of Victoria, Princess of Hesse (Alix and Ella's elder sister), and a major character in THE ROMANOV BRIDES. My friend, the historian Ilana Miller, has produced this book titled "Queen Victoria's Favourite Granddaughter," and it is now available on Amazon UK. I am amazed by the details and the breadth of Ilan's account—worthy of Victoria's long and eventful life! Born at Windsor in April 1863 she grew up in Darmstadt, the eldest child of Alice, Queen Victoria's second daughter, and Grand Duke Louis of Hesse. She married Prince Louis of Battenberg, her great love, and they were the grandparents of Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, making her the great-grandmother of King Charles III. She witnessed many triumphs in her life, her own and her sons, but she also faced many tragedies, including the murder of two of her sisters. I highly recommend this biography for any one eager for more information about the family circle I attempted to bring to life in my novel.

As I writer, I tend to write long....which is not a good thing. Flabby prose can never be excellent prose, and forcing your reader to slog through any more words than are truly necessary is a sin against art (along with being boring, being pretentious, and being imprecise.) I treasure good editing, and was lucky enough to work with Lucia Macro, an editor at Morrow, on both of my novels. Lucia took over 30,000 words out of THE ROMANOV BRIDES and no one will miss them (but me.) Now that the book's publication date is upon us, I have decided to resuscitate one of the chapters that ended up on the cutting room floor. I can justify this! I am giving potential readers a chance to sample the tone of the novel! But also it makes me happy to think these scenes that I labored over are not lost totally and forever. If curious, you can find this excerpt on my website, claremchugh.com.

My new novel, THE ROMANOV BRIDES, is taking its first steps out into the world, and that's so very exciting. The pub date is March 12, but the book is now available via NetGalley, and as a Goodreads giveaway.
Here's what I can tell you about my new "baby": It resembles my first, but has a rather different nature.
I knew I wanted to return to the late Victorian world, where A MOST ENGLISH PRINCESS is set, and revisit the family of the great Queen. Like all families, this clan had its shining stars and its black sheep, its rivalries and its alliances, its triumphs and its tragedies. And because the children of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert married into the other royal families of Europe, they created a web of relations that had an outsized impact on history. I knew there was much more here to explore.
I became curious about the four beautiful princesses of Hesse, said to be Queen Victoria's favorite granddaughters. The Queen paid them special attention after they lost their mother, Princess Alice, to diphtheria. No young women in the extended royal family were more sought after as brides than the Hesse princesses, and the Queen hoped to guide them into matches of her choosing. In the end, each sister defied her.
The Queen, distrustful of all Russians, found it particularly hard to accept when her pet, Princess Ella, married a Romanov Grand Duke, Serge. And at Ella's wedding the youngest Hesse princess, Alix, met the 16-year-old tsarevich, Nicky. One of the most famous—and most tragic—love stories in modern history was set into motion.
My novel is a kind of prequel. Like all couples Nicholas and Alexandra, the last tsar and tsarina, had a back story—and this is theirs. I was struck as I researched and wrote about their courtship how they were flawed, as all people are, but essentially well-intentioned. Their world was a narrow one for all it's sophistication, and they didn't anticipate the historical forces mustering against them. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say they failed to envision how different the future would be from the past. And, most poignantly, they hadn't understood the risk of hemophilia that Alix carried.
Their love blossomed in ignorance of much, but within the intimate realm of a glamorous royal circle, in a grand, imperial Europe that was about to disappear forever.
I hope you will read and enjoy THE ROMANOV BRIDES. I welcome comments and feedback, good and bad. And I trust you will be surprised by some of what you learn about Alix and her sisters.

Writing today in the Washington Post, I suggest books for those who miss Hilary Mantel's genius Wolf Hall series, and add comments about what makes historical fiction work.
Read here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...

Tomorrow night--Monday October 12 at 7pm Eastern--I am going to be giving a virtual event with a wonderful old friend, Dr Thomas Schwartz professor of history at Vanderbilt University. Tom was the TA in a fascinating class on European diplomatic history taught by Professor David Kaiser at Harvard College in 1980 where I was first inspired by the story of Bismarck and the unification of Germany that is at the heart of A MOST ENGLISH PRINCESS. Tom and I are going to talk about what novelists can reveal about history that historians can't, and vice versa! If you are interested in the craft of historical fiction, I think you will enjoy. Watch LIVE via the Facebook page of Parnassus Bookstore in Nashville. https://www.facebook.com/parnassusboo...

Writing a novel about someone is an intimate encounter. Even if that person died 100 years ago. Even if that person occupied an exalted position, the like of which you’ll never know. Even if you’re compelled to take liberties, guessing what that person was thinking or feeling or desiring at various moments.
I was attracted to Princess Victoria, Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, because her predicament aroused me—my ire, my pity, my interest. Once I spent long periods in her company, I fell in love. And now I hope that by telling her story, in fiction, other people will come to love her, too.
While I’m very close to the princess, we’ve not met, since we occupy different worlds. In fall 2017 I was working as a magazine editor and executive at the US company, Time Inc. when—poof—my job and my company vanished. I might have scrambled into a lifeboat, and found safe harbor at a job at a successor firm, but, in truth, the collapse of the print advertising business had hollowed out magazines. I worried who I would be when I was no longer a publishing bigwig, yet the time had come, after 30 years in journalism, to try something else.
I’ve always loved fiction, and I’ve always been interested in history, especially of England where my mother grew up, and of Germany, where I lived briefly as a teenager. On the Bicentennial, July 4, 1976, I was at the US army base in Sogel West Germany, a moment when World War II still lurked just around the corner in people’s memories. Why had civilized Germany descended into barbarism? I studied modern European history at college in part to understand that. And decades later I was still pondering.
So I took these interests, and the severance checks I received for a year, and decided to write a novel. For my maiden effort, I wasn’t confident I could pull off a vivid re-imagining of the past—like Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See or EL Doctorow’s Ragtime—where the main characters are entirely fictional. More comfortable for me was writing about a real person as Hilary Mantel does in Wolf Hall and Gore Vidal in Lincoln. But whom to choose? Who would intrigue both me and a wide audience? And while I obsessed over the rise of the Nazis, so much historical fiction is about World War II. Could I go further back in time and dramatize the seeds of later tragedy? These vague notions in mind, I stumbled upon Vicky.
Princess Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa, to use her full name, was Queen Victoria’s first child—born in November 1840 a scant nine and half months after the Queen’s marriage to her first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. As the baby was being delivered the disappointed doctor called out, “Tsk, Ma’am it’s a princess.” The queen replied, “Not to worry, the next will be a prince.” And, indeed, Vicky’s brother, Albert Edward, called Bertie, was born a year later. From the very start, Vicky occupied a peculiar position in her family, acknowledged as the brightest and the most capable of the royal couple’s nine children, and yet tipped to be shipped abroad, married off to a foreign prince, no chance to inherit the throne that her mother occupied.
I, too, am the eldest in my family with a brother only a year younger. I could imagine how painful it would be, relegated to second best when you were firstborn just because you were a lesser—a girl. So that’s how it began with me and Vicky: I identified with her. And then there was Vicky’s royal status. During my years in the magazine business, I’d seen how only the Pope dying or famous movie stars splitting moved more magazines than the British royal family doing anything at all. While Vicky’s predicament spoke to me, I committed to her was because I thought she would sell.
Also, I could work the Nazis into Vicky’s story. Vicky took part in the birth of the German nation, in 1871, because the prince chosen to be her husband was a German, Prince Frederick of Prussia, called Fritz. And it was the Prussians, led by the crafty Prussian aristocrat Otto von Bismarck, who finally united the thirty-plus German states into a single country. Bismarck called his method “blood and iron,” and ever after bellicosity characterized the German Empire, right into the twentieth century. And we all know how that turned out.
So I embarked on my life with Vicky feeling kindly disposed to her—sort of like an arranged marriage, it made sense. Then I started reading her letters and encountered a vulnerable yet determined girl, who matured into a valiant woman, stumbling often and suffering much but remaining true to her desire to be good and do good. I got that itchy, excited feeling I always got when I was a reporter, landing a juicy interview. Vicky’s letters were stupendous copy: her youthful idealism, her rhapsodic descriptions of her romance with Fritz, her humorous quips about the dreadful Berlin court, her raging against the lies that Bismarck told and the fate he brought down upon her family, and millions of other Germans. Vicky wrote these letters, more than four thousand of them, to her mother back in Britain from the time she left home as a 17-year-old bride in January 1858 until Queen Victoria’s death in January 1901.
With Vicky’s own words to provide the emotional backbone of the story, I got on with writing. A year passed and I felt smug. We were a killer combination—me and my princess. After I had a 100,00 word-long draft, I decided I’d sharpen it a bit before submitting to publishers. I signed up for a writing class at the 92nd Street Y with the novelist Sandra Newman. I handed in the first three chapters. I thought my classmates were sure to love it all, with a few reservations naturally. But I would learn from their small suggestions and finish off the book.
Imagine my shock when they said it didn’t work. A few people liked Vicky, but most of the class considered my novel boring or, worse, derivative. “I’ve watched the Crown,” said one woman with a dismissive flick of her hand, “there’s nothing new here.” The teacher summed it up in the most constructive way: “This is journalism, Clare, not fiction.”
So I took Vicky home, my tail between my legs.
Several weeks of anger, denial, and sadness followed‚—a mini-grief response, the death of my dream of writing a novel. I wasn’t sure how to go forward, or if I wanted to go forward, and I hated that I had squandered my year’s severance and gotten exactly nowhere. My employer-sponsored health insurance due to run out, I went for a mammogram for the first time in three years.
I was lying in a darkened exam room, stripped to the waist, when the radiologist pressed the ultra-sound paddle down hard on my gel-covered right nipple and, looking into her glowing blue screen, announced I had breast cancer. One minute I was floating in the warm sea of normality and the next I was rolled by an ice-cold breaker I never saw coming.
Of course, my indisputable diagnosis was not so unusual. Millions of other women before me have been told the same—including Vicky. Before she died of breast cancer, it migrated to her bones and she screamed in pain at all hours so much so that her servants stuffed their ears with cotton wool to keep out the sounds of her agony.
The best doctors in Europe in 1901, Vicky’s 61st year, could do nothing to stop a disease discovered as a lump in her right breast. But the fine physicians at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering dispatched my lump without fuss two days after Christmas, 2018. I spent a mere six hours at the hospital. A 9-mm tumor in a post-menopausal woman without family history of breast cancer? Nothing to get upset about, the surgeon pronounced.
But I did get upset. My cancer combined with everything else—my evident failure as a fiction writer, the irretrievability of my corporate career, the descent into Alzheimer’s of my dignified mother, the simultaneous diagnosis of cancer in a handful of other friends and family members, turned me gloomy and morbid. Worse, I felt hard done by. How could it be that I was no longer a golden child, impervious to cruel fate?
Ha! Sorrow stalks us all.
So what to do with this completely commonplace revelation I came to aged 57? Trudging to the library one day at the end of January, it occurred to me that I was a wimp. Was I going to give up on Vicky because my first attempt to bring her alive fell flat? Was I too proud to say that I had a lot to learn? Did I really lack the will to continue? I still believed in the story, and I still thought about Vicky all the time—lyrics I heard in songs, and news items I read in the paper reminded me of her. I missed her. And I felt a renewed sympathy for her, living in the past where midlife cancer was a death sentence.
When I resolved to start again with Vicky, I turned back to Sandra Newman. I asked her to read the whole manuscript and tell me what could be salvaged. She bested the cancer docs for bedside manner. She was soothing even when she delivered her verdict: there’s not much here. But she agreed the trajectory of the novel had potential. It was a matter of a completely new approach. “Get in her head and stay there,” she advised.
I fretted over authenticity. How could I ever imagine, accurately, what it was like to be a princess, and then a German Empress, and then a bereft widow, living in a huge castle, despised by one’s son? Yes, Vicky’s letters help, but in the end all fiction is a leap of empathy. I chose to write about a real person but I couldn’t skip invention. I was scared the way I was when I jumped into the deep end of a swimming pool for the first time. My “life-jacket”—careful, close reliance on facts that had girded my writing heretofore was gone. I had to take all I knew about this woman I adored, and dare to envision how she would feel, and what she would say and do. I had to go below the surface of her—below even the version of her life she presented to her mother in private letters.
It took five months. After I handed the rewritten novel to my agent it took her two weeks to sell it. Several publishers said no, but one said yes, and one is all you need.
Now Vicky is venturing out in the world, in my novel A MOST ENGLISH PRINCESS. Not everyone will like her, I’m sure, nor was she ever completely likeable. Opinionated, admonitory, and starchy like her mother, she rubbed plenty of people the wrong way. She was smart, but not so smart she didn’t get the wrong end of the stick sometimes. The royal families in Britain and in Germany were a snippy lot, rivalrous and resentful, and Vicky was in the thick of some ugly incidents. But in general, she tried to be the best wife, mother and public servant she could be. Even weighed down with grief, she fought back against bitterness and recommitted to her duty. In free moments she pursued her passion for painting. And she was dauntless about saying aloud what she knew was going wrong in Germany—even when it cost her.
I am confident now that others, too, will come to love Vicky, and I present her with the pride one feels for a cherished friend, mixed with gratitude for all that she taught me.

I was so lucky to be interviewed by the BBC culture department this week discussing A Most English Princess. The reporter wanted to probe whether or not fiction is an effective way to explore and expose the lives of the people living in the royal fishbowl. And she asked me if I wished I had lived as Vicky did, with all the privileges and all the access and all the wealth. I have to say: no, I think it's not a deal I would take. Have a look at the article and let me know if you agree.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/2...

I just finished Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family by Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand and I am amazed by two things: first, how much access the co-authors clearly had to sources close to Harry and Meghan. The book may not be an authorized biography, but it is obviously the story the Sussex’s want out there, and for that reason alone it’s an informative and intriguing read.
Having researched my new novel, A Most English Princess: A Novel of Queen Victoria's Daughter, the story of Princess Vicky, the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria, I’m struck by the strong parallels between the two women. Meghan is much like Vicky was, a foreigner who arrived in a deeply traditional court where protocol and precedence govern the royal family’s every move. Meghan’s fresh ideas and the energy and experience she brought to her new royal role were constantly being discounted by senior courtiers, just as Vicky, a well-educated young princess with liberal notions, was sidelined in the Berlin court in the 1860’s. Of course, 150 years ago the world was a different place, and plenty of women struggled to make their voices heard. What happened to Vicky was disappointing, especially given all that she offered to her adopted country of Prussia, but it was not entirely unexpected. The Prussian ruling class, the Junkers, were a very conservative bunch, right up into the 20th century. But that the British royal family so misjudged and mishandled Meghan is startling. You can argue that she should have been more tactful, more accommodating—more docile in other words. But as FINDING FREEDOM so vividly makes clear the institution of the royal family was not flexible enough to carve out a place for American-born Meghan who had so much to give. History repeats itself, and the loss is the UK’s.

The world lives in lockdown, the future is uncertain, bookshops have closed (boo,hiss) and this is the moment when I intend to start writing about something that never changes: the passionate pursuit of great books—terrific stories so well told that for a moment the real world recedes and all that concerns the reader is the world of the book.
I am awaiting the publication of my own first novel, a book that I hope readers will fall in love with, a story that I trust will both engross and entertain them. That book is called A Most English Princess—but more about that later. Today I want to mention 10 books that started me off a reader, which convinced me that the best moments of life would be spent glued to the page. These are my favorites, pre-age 15. You most likely have your own Starting Gun Ten, and I'd like to hear about them. Here are mine to kick off the discussion:
1. Laura Ingalls Wilder, all, but particularly The Long Winter.
The Long Winter
2. Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy Harriet the Spy
3. Elizabeth Enright, The Saturdays The Saturdays
4. Lucy Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables Anne of Green Gables
5. E.L.Konigsburg, From the Mixed Up FIles of Mrs Basil E.Frankweiler From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
6. C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
7. Mara Kay, Masha Masha
8. Hester Burton, In Spite of all Terror In Spite of All Terror
9. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind Gone with the Wind
10. Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love The Pursuit of Love