This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
L. M. Shakespeare writes poems, short stories and novels. She has written three financial thrillers and, more recently, The Messenger and historical novel Malice. She tells Novelicious why reading The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas gave her a passion for historical novels, and an unwavering ambition to be a writer.
My life has been on a book track all along, so it isn’t easy to say which one caused the most change in a life that constantly zigzagged or reared like a bucking horse, mounted now on Jane Eyre, now on Dickens, now Tolstoy, now Herman Hesse’s Journey to the East, now Steinbeck’s Mice and Men, now Henry James and never forgetting the Wind in the Willows that forever caused my view of the English countryside to be inhabited by thinking feeling animals on equal terms with me.
But to pick a moment, here I am aged about 13, sitting in a rust-coloured linen armchair in the school library reading The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas.
This marvellous historical novel set in the time of Louis X111, King of France and married to the beautiful Queen Anne of Austria, recreates an historically accurate seventeenth century environment, as the setting for an irresistible story. It wiped all other ambitions from my mind; no more concert pianists, opera singers, ballet, 12th century German religious painters, Japanese prints, hockey matches, hunting. The only thing I wanted to be was a writer, and almost the only thing I wanted to do was to read The Three Musketeers. This is not a children’s book as such, but one for all ages. The historical context is intoxicatingly correct. It was an age when an impecunious minor nobleman like the young d’Artagnan could get his foot in the door of state by his wits and courage alone.Dumas, with most enviable style and skill (he is a wonderful writer), depicts the character of d’Artagnan and his companions so seductively that I fell irrevocably in love with them. Until I read this book I pretty much thought I was a boy. I much preferred wild sports, mud and tree climbing to doing girly things. Now all of a sudden I could not work out whether I wanted to be one of the musketeers (in which case was it Athos or d’Artagnan) or to be the beautiful woman romantically adored by one of them. After a while I chose the latter.
I’ll never forget a day at home when my father, a doctor, came to give me an injection – one of the routine vaccinations of childhood. The last time he saw me I was being a boy; someone who fell off walls without crying and scorned the idea of pain, so he came towards me holding this hypodermic with no hesitation. Suddenly, before his very eyes, he saw my cheeks wet with tears and I managed a fairly realistic faint. I was changed alright!
I have never tired of reading that book. It gave me an enduring love of historical novels. It is a wonderful genre, from Dumas to Mary Renault, to Marguerite Yourcenar to Hilary Mantel and many more. Soundly and accurately rooted in a detailed knowledge of the period, and intelligent and sophisticated interpretations of real events seen through the fictional eyes of ‘real’ characters, the range has been phenomenal. Hilary Mantel’s wonderful Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies exemplifies the pinnacle of such writing. And of course, I have written an historical novel myself. After my three financial thrillers, Malice was published, based upon the surviving letters of Madame, the second wife of Philippe, brother of Louis X1V. He was thought, by many, to have murdered his first wife…