Vintage Hogg – old wine in old bottles?

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg,

Introduction, by Lucy Hughes-Hallett (Vintage Classics, 2009), 211pp, pbk,

ISBN 978-0-099-51904-1

Here’s Vintage Classic’s ‘modern’ spin on Confessions:

Robert is a difficult and disturbed young man. He comes from a troubled family background and turns to his Calvinist faith for solace but finds it hard to get along with other people, particularly his brother and his dissolute father. After he falls in with the mysterious and charming Gil-Martin his actions become more and more extreme. He convinces himself that he is one of the lucky few who have been chosen for heaven and therefore all his actions are automatically right and good … even murder.  [back-cover, 2009]

While it’s right that Hogg’s important nineteenth-century novel remains in print and available to a wide readership, Vintage Classics, in attempting to modernise Confessions for contemporary readers, does a disservice, both to Hogg’s novel and to his image as a professional writer. The dumbing-down continues inside where the new version gives scant attention to Hogg’s biography, disregards the authority of the original text and ignores current research.

James Hogg was born on 9 December 1770 in Ettrick Forest in Selkirk, Scotland. He taught himself how to read and write before being introduced to Walter Scott who helped him in his literary career. His first collection of poems, The Mountain Bard, was published in 1807 and this was followed by The Queen’s Wake in 1813. He went on to work for Blackwood’s Magazine and published his most famous work, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, in 1824. James Hogg died on 21 November 1835.

Hogg was baptised not ‘born’ on 9 December 1770. His date of birth is unknown. He was born at Ettrick Hall Farm in the Ettrick Valley, within the ancient Ettrick Forest. His ‘first collection of poems’ was not The Mountain Bard (1807) but Scottish Pastorals (1801), which, as far as is known, Scott did not have a hand in. While Hogg did, in a sense, ‘work for Blackwood’s’, by contributing songs, poems and short stories, he published much more than the titles provided on the ‘Other Works by Hogg’ listing.

 The Mountain Bard

The Queen’s Wake

The Three Perils of Man

The Three Perils of Woman

The Shepherd’s Calendar

Songs by the Ettrick Shepherd

A Queer Book

Tales of the Wars of Montrose

The listing discounts a lot of Hogg’s writing and a lot of what went into shaping his craft. For example, in 1810-11 he edited and wrote the bulk of the material for the Spy, a weekly Edinburgh newspaper. In 1810 he published The Forest Minstrel, his first song collection. He published long narrative poems, Mador of the Moor (1814), Pilgrims of the Sun and Queen Hynde (1823), and a further novel: The Brownie of Bodsbeck and Other Tales (1818) as well as an earlier collection of short stories, Winter Evening Tales (1820; 1821). He also collected and edited an important song collection, Jacobite Relics (1818; 1821) and in his lifetime published numerous short stories, poems, songs and verse dramas.

            Knowledge of Hogg’s publications, especially of the Spy and Brownie of Bodsbeck, help to clarify and contextualise the issues raised in Confessions. For example, the fictional character of John Miller, ‘equipt with a grey plaid, and staff, like a Nithsdale Shepherd […] the son of a poor school-master in a remote part of the country; a good English and Latin scholar, yet uses the broadest dialect of the district’, and ‘the Spy’ are and are not aspects of Hogg himself. Through these figures Hogg comments on Edinburgh society at the same time as he was moving within those same genteel circles: doubling is at the heart of Hogg’s fiction, it isn’t something he adopted for Confessions. The Brownie of Bodsbeck is Hogg’s fictionalisation of the ‘Killing Times’, the period in the late 1680s when strict government repression met with dogged resistance among religious moderates and zealots. In The Brownie Hogg shows how the ‘rage of fanaticism of former days’ (Confessions, 2009, p. 78) affects ordinary Scottish people caught up between opposing sides. At a deeper level, he also comments on the nature of ‘truth’ in the way that he gives equal weight to both recorded documents and oral tales. Both, he seems to imply here as he does through the multiple narrative perspectives in Confessions, should be treated with circumspection:

‘ “Should the truth be tauld or no’ tauld? That’s the question. What’s truth? Ay, there comes the crank! nae man can tell tha’ – for what’s truth to ane is a lee to another […] Truth’s just as it is ta’en.” ’ (The Brownie of Bodsbeck (1818), 2 vols, II, 235-36)

            Vintage Classics does not give editorial details about the text that was used in preparation of the new version (the manuscript has never been located). There is no bibliography and the front matter simply states that the book was ‘first published in 1824’. Now, to me, this implies that the text used is that of 1824 but comparison shows this is not the case. Integral to the text is a ‘Fac Simile’ of a manuscript page of the sinner’s memoirs taken from the ‘little book’ found in the suicide’s grave. In the 1824 version of Confessions, this page is printed before the title page and dedication to ‘the Hon. William Smith, Lord Provost of Glasgow’. Neither the facsimile nor the dedication are reprinted as part of the Vintage Classics version. At the end of the 1824 version of Confessions the ‘Editor’ notes ‘I have ordered the printer to procure a facsimile of it, to be bound in with the volume’ (Confessions, 2009, p. 210). Original readers would find the facsimile printed before the text in just the way the Editor claims so that, as well as providing ‘evidence’ of the pamphlet’s existence, it is part of Hogg’s strategy of authenticating both the Editor’s Narrative and the Sinner’s Narrative to reveal that no one has authority on the ‘truth’. Readers of the Vintage Classic edition find a note in parenthesis, ‘[v. Frontispiece]’ which indicates only that it might exist.

[image from scran website ]

There is evidence of editorial interference to the original text but nothing to indicate why it has been done. There are slight changes to the orthography, for example, in the addition or deletion of punctuation marks, as well as more significant changes to the text:

original 1824 -‘ “Then will you be so kind as come to the Grass Market and see me put down?” ’ (p.90)

VC, 2009 -‘ “Then will you be so kind as to come to the Grass Market and see me put down?” ’ (p. 51)

original 1824 -‘to his right leal and trust-worthy cousin’ (p. 274)

VC, 2009 -‘to his right trusty cousin’ (p. 149)]

The textual changes seem to follow those found in modern versions, such as the Campion Reprint of 1924, the Cresset Press of 1942, or the Penguin Modern Classics edited by John Carey in 1969 which all ‘tidied up’ Hogg’s original wording and which suggests that the text was set from one of these ‘derivatives’ and not the original 1824 text. A full discussion of modern versions and a listing of editorial changes can be found in P. D. Garside’s recent research edition (EUP, 2002, pp. 195-199)

            Confessions has enjoyed wonderfully insightful editors, both recently and in the past, yet Lucy Hughes-Hallett mentions only Andre Gide’s 1940 edition. She summarises significant debates and research on the novel but doesn’t offer a bibliography to connect her thinking with previous editors, like Peter Carey, Garside, Adrian Hunter (Broadview Press, 2001), or Karl Miller (Penguin Classics, 2006). While Hughes-Hallett makes the obvious connection between current ideologies, terrorism and fanaticism (as has been made since 1824) she offers no new observations on the text and in parts, is inaccurate. For example, to (wrongly) explain the origin of ‘predestination’ she falls into the trap of deciding that ‘the Scottish Covenanters … are the target of Hogg’s satire’ (p. xi), when this is both untrue and a simplification of a complex issue. A thorough discussion on religion and Confessions is found in Ian Campbell’s ‘Afterword’ in the EUP edition (pp. 177-194).

It’s interesting to compare Ian Rankin’s introduction to the new Canongate edition (2008) of Confessions (already discussed on the blog – click here). Rankin is a professional author who knows how to respect his readers and the text so that he manages to modernise Confessions without dumbing it down.

Remembering…

Remembering…

My experience of war is confined to books, research, history, text, empty battlefields and tv news. Still, on Remembrance Sunday and on the 11^th at 11am I remember.

I remember a woman, standing on the corner across the street from the Martin Luther King Library, in Washington D.C.. She was crying, or, to be precise, she was crying and screaming, very loudly, about war and the injustice of loss. I crossed the street to avoid her and took a longer route to the metro-line. I was embarrassed. Embarrassed about the scene she was creating – embarrassed at her womanly ‘madness’ – embarrassed at my own embarrassment. I spent the day in the Library of Congress researching Napoleonic war poems and thinking of the woman; thinking that, if she was still there at 5 o’clock, I would speak to her. I thought, if I was brave enough, I might take her for a cup of tea. 

I remembered her black hair flying in the wind, her blue coat flapping open, her flat shoes and the way that she stood, with one foot up one foot down on the high kerb. I remembered her tear-stained face. I remembered the medal she held up to the sunlight… When I returned in the early evening, she was gone.

I always think of her in November and always regret avoiding her; avoiding the harsh reality and the stark, mad, angry truth of war.

I asked recently in a ‘tweet’, ‘What is your favourite war poem’.  The response brought some surprises and some familiar titles, and I was introduced to poems I wish I’d known sooner. Out of the response I’ve compiled a ‘Twitterthology of War Poems’. 

Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ was mentioned most frequently so it’s pasted in below.

What, or whom do you remember?

• Here, Bullet, Brian Turner, from @StepUpFinance
• ‘Drummer Hodge’, Hardy http://tinyurl.com/yf224k8 Kipling: “If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied …” from @TallStoriesBook
• ‘i sing of Olaf glad and from big’, by ee cummings, http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15408 from @redredbeard
• ‘In Parenthesis’, David Jones, Moments of real sublimity. Unjustly thought of as impenetrable. ‘Canoe’, by Keith Hughes. Modern, Hugely moving. Good analysis of it in Paulin’s Secret Life of Poems, from @ahmpreston
• ‘High Flight’ by John Gillespie Magee http://bit.ly/3AYm6 from @lilliesleaf
• “In Flanders Fields” by McCrae, “Dulce et Decorum est” by Owen, “The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner” by Jarrell from @thebookmaven
• An old one by Siegfried Sassoon: ‘Suicide in the Trenches’, from @paula_sherrill
• It might not be the most original choice but the power of the words still hit you. ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ by Wilfred Owen, from @insidebooks
• I remember being moved at school by anything Siegfried Sassoon, from @RobAroundBooks
• ‘War Music’, …selections from the Iliad, by Christopher Logue, from @annthewriter
• ‘On Somme’, or ‘The Silent one’, by Ivor Gurney, from @DavidDOCT
• ‘Attack’, by Siegfried Sassoon. Utterly unprecedented http://bit.ly/21fhrV from @clivebirnie
• ‘The Soilder’, by Rupert Brooke, from @stujallen
• ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’, from @iamamro
• ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’, from @CafeNirvana
•  ‘Still Falls the Rain’, by Edith Sitwell, from @Margit11 
• Has to be ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, from @the_rts 
• ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, from @hoodedpigwoman 
• ‘Dulce et Decorum est’, by Wilfred Owen, from @RedMummy

 

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of tired, outstripped5 Five-Nines that dropped behind.

 

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! –  An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

 

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est

Pro patria mori.

 

8 October 1917 – March, 1918

Keeper wins Wellcome Book Prize

Keeper: Living with Nancy – a journey into Alzheimer’s by Andrea Gillies (Short Books) has won the inaugural Wellcome Book Prize (2009). The prize “celebrates the best of medicine in literature by awarding £25,000 each year for the finest fiction or non-fiction book centred around medicine.”

I read this unassuming paperback in the summer and was blown away with its emotional depth and by the literary quality of Gillies’ writing. I’ve reviewed it for print and will post a link on the ‘reviews’ page once it’s published. Meantime, here’s what the publisher says of Keeper:

Andrea Gillies made the decision to take on the full-time care of her mother-in-law, Nancy, an Alzheimer’s sufferer. With her family, she moved to a remote peninsula in northern Scotland to a house with space to accommodate Nancy and her elderly husband, and there embarked on an extraordinary journey.

Keeper describes the emotional strain of living with Alzheimer’s, the trials faced by both sufferer and carer, when patience and obligations are pushed to the limit. The book is also a brilliantly illuminating examination of the disease itself. It explores the brain and consciousness, and tackles profound questions about the self, the soul and how memory informs who we are. [Short Books]

In awarding the Book Prize the Wellcome Trust considered Keeper to be “a very humane and honest exploration of living with Alzheimer’s giving an illuminating account of the disease itself”.  Jo Brand, who chaired the judging panel said at the award’s ceremony:

 “Andrea Gillies’ account of living with Alzheimer’s is the perfect fusion of narrative with enough memorable science not to choke you. It’s a fantastic book – down to earth and darkly comic in places. The judges found it compelling”.

 Link HERE to go to the Wellcome Trust Book Prize website 

pondering…

David Vann’s latest book is a strange and wondrous beastie. I finished reading it a wee while ago and I’m still in the twilight zone - the betwixt and between stage of wondering what I just read and re-reading it while I sort my thoughts into a coherent form.

So what is it?

I got a third of the way into Legend of a Suicide before I realised it isn’t a novel but a collection of 5 interconnected short stories and a novella. The ’story’ as such, is centred around the life of Roy Fenn and it relates how his father’s suicide affected him in childhood and later life. The shifting point of view is key, I think, to getting to grips with the narrative.

Beginning in the first person we get Roy’s perspective. Within the first tale he tells us the details of his life: how, when and where he was born, about his parent’s unhappy marriage and divorce and his father’s suicide and its aftermath. Subsequent stories fill in more details, moving both backwards and forwards in time and shifting between registers with alarming ease. It’s simultaneously funny and tragic, shocking and poignant.

In the novella, the viewpoint moves to third person. It’s a significant change. Vann plays with our readerly expectations and packs a quite surprising punch at its conclusion.

The book is dedicated to Vann’s own father, who, it turns out, committed suicide. The short bio note at the end tells us that, like Roy Fenn, Vann ‘was born on Adak Island, Alaska and spent his childhood in Ketchikan.’ I think that’s why I’m having trouble writing about Legend of a Suicide. It’s a work of fiction, a fabrication woven out of the facts of Vann’s life. Postmodernists will have it that the author is dead – the text is king and nothing else matters. Here, though, it’s hard to separate out the author from his fiction. Vann knows this, of course, and toys with the reader.

To whet your appetite while I ponder on it some more, click to Penguin’s websitewhere they’ve an interview with David Vann, some critical comments and an extract from the first story.

Contents

1. Ichthyology, pp. 1-10

2. Rhoda, pp. 11-23

3. A Legend of Good Men, pp. 24-34

4. Sukkwan Island, part 1, pp. 35-128; part 2, pp. 129-199

5. Ketchikan, pp. 200-219

6. The Higher Blue, pp. 220-228

Already published in the US to critical acclaim, it will be published in the UK by Penguin on 29 October

-here’s the publisher’s blurb:

Roy is still young when his father, a failed dentist and hapless fisherman, puts a .44 magnum to his head and commits suicide on the deck of his beloved boat. Throughout his life, Roy returns to that moment, gripped by its memory and the shadow it casts over his small-town boyhood, describing with poignant, mercurial wit his parents’ woeful marriage and inevitable divorce, their kindnesses and weaknesses, the absurd and comic turning-points of his past. Finally, in Legend of a Suicide, Roy lays his father’s ghost to rest. But not before he exacts a gruelling, exhilarating revenge.

Revolving around a fatally misconceived adventure deep in the wilderness of Alaska, this is a remarkably tender story of survival and disillusioned love.

Q&A with Kathleen Kent, author of The Heretic’s Daughter

The Heretic’s Daughter

by Kathleen Kent (London: PanMacmillan, January 2009; September 2009)

ISBN 978-0-230-70443-5, 352pp • £16.99 hbk

ISBN 978-0-330-45630-2, 400pp • £16.99 pbk

 As much a coming-of-age tale as an eye-witness account of the witch-trials in New England, in 1692, The Heretic’s Daughter encompasses an ugly period of American history. For Kathleen Kent, though, Salem is not simply a metaphor for American extremism; it’s where history becomes ‘her-story’. In her debut novel, she interweaves family fireside tales with the written documents of the past to craft a compelling tale with grand themes encompassing extremism, slavery, and personal liberty.

Since first publication in the US in hardback in September 2008, The Heretic’s Daughter has slowly gained a large and dedicated readership. To date it has garnered a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly, 91 reviews on Amazon (mostly 4 and 5 stars), reached the New York Times Bestseller list and received many glowing reviews in the national and international press. LINK HERE to the publisher’s website for reviews and book information.  

The UK paperback version of The Heretic’s Daughter was released on 4 September 2009.

Kathleen Kent graciously agreed to answer a few questions about her quietly assured debut novel.

Q: I’m very interested in the difference between personal history and documented history and the gap that often opens up between them. You say on your website that, to give authenticity to your story when writing The Heretic’s Daughter, you drew on your own family history and also researched widely in private and personal documents. What was your strategy for dealing with any uncomfortable ‘gaps’ between document and legend? Did you forge a middle way? Or did you choose one interpretation and follow it through?

 

A: I have always felt that the most interesting and compelling historical fiction is firmly anchored in fact and so I used many of the authentic names, dates and places from the Salem witch trials to give the reader a sense of life in 17^th century New England.  That being said, I wanted to unfold a very personal rendering of Martha Carrier, one that had been passed down to me by my mother and grandmother.  From an early age, I had heard stories of Martha being an outspoken, strong-willed woman.  That perception of her was reinforced by the witch trial documents which revealed she had had quite a few disagreements with her neighbours, some of whom, when deposed by the courts, stated they had long suspected her of being a witch.  In crafting the novel, though, I had to make some selective choices which changed the historical fact for the sake of pacing or believability.  For example, I made the decision to make Sarah, the narrator of the novel and Martha’s daughter, a few years older—nine years of age, instead of six— because I believed an older child would make a more convincing story-teller.  The Salem witch trials, in a sense, became the back-story in the beginning chapters of the book, albeit an important one, because I wanted to more closely illuminate the themes of religious intolerance, the destructive forces of superstitious dread and the corruption of a small community through hysteria and rumour- mongering; themes which I believed were timeless and universal.                                                                               

Hatchette Book Group provide a good index of source material consulted in preparation of The Heretic’s Daughter. CLICK this link

Q: Within the story, you allude to previous authors who have written of the Salem witch trials, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Arthur Miller.  Do you think, as they did, that we learn more ‘truth’ about our present situation from historical fiction than straightforward historical accounts?

A: History is written by the survivors and “factual” history is often taught within a very narrowly defined band of ethics and sensibilities.   Many people, authors included, have challenged that narrow band of what’s considered true and have revealed a greater spectrum of human emotions and experiences; especially from a woman’s perspective. Currently, there does seem to be a greater blurring of boundaries between “fact” and “fiction.”  There are genres of “historical fiction” and “fictionalized history” which can be tricky if you’re searching for archaeological remnants.   But I do think that bracing, accurate historical fiction can reveal so many philosophical, moral and cultural truths about our ancestors and our heritage that a dry recitation of dates and places cannot.

 Q: “Martha was not a witch. Merely a ferocious woman!” The women and girls of Salem and surrounding settlements were accused of witchcraft and ultimately condemned because of the testimony of other young girls. New England society, religion and judiciary was male dominated so that it could be argued that male society put women against women. Cotton Mather, the great seventeenth-century theologian, called Martha Carrier, “the Queen of Hell” because of her strength of character. How deliberate is your portrayal of Martha Carrier?  Did you begin with her strength and build the other characters around her or did her strength grow out of the weakness of the other characters?

A: When I first began writing the book, Martha was the narrator.  But this posed some problems right away because the trials and imprisonment of nearly 150 men, women and children continued after Martha was hanged.  I felt a big part of that story had not been told, so I made the decision to develop Sarah as the first hand witness to the cruelty and deprivation of the witch hysteria.  Sarah was arrested as a witch and tried, along with her three brothers, spending months in prison.  I felt that Martha’s character initially might not be likeable to the reader because she was so unyielding in her defence of her family and her property, but it was also important for me to illustrate her remarkable bravery and fortitude.   Martha was the only person, according to the surviving records, who not only held steadfastly to her innocence, but who confronted her judges for listening to a group of hysterical, accusing girls.   It is through Sarah’s eyes that Martha’s strength is revealed.

Q: Martha Carrier’s story has always been a part of your story – what made you decide to write it down for publication?

A: Since college, I always had in mind to write this novel.  But I lived in New York City for nearly twenty years working in various commercial enterprises before I felt I had the time and resources to devote to such an ambitious project.  In 2000 I moved with my family back to Dallas, my childhood home, and made the conscious decision to begin the research and writing of The Heretic’s Daughter.  I spent close to five years researching and travelling to New England, gathering historical fact, family legends and local Massachusetts lore about the Carrier family.

Q:The Heretic’s Daughter is as much about coming-of-age as about witchcraft. Did you have a teenage audience in mind as you were writing?

A: I wrote for an adult audience primarily, but because the book encompasses themes that are relevant to teenagers (peer pressure, gossiping and the vagaries of being in the throes of raging hormones), it has been discovered by younger readers as well.  There are currently schools, middle schools and high schools,  that are including the book in their curriculum and suggested reading lists as a companion reading piece to The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible.    Some of the most enlivening and enthusiastic audiences have been the students attending the schools where I have given talks.  

Q: Your next book fills in the gaps of Thomas Carrier’s past and delves into the mysterious Red Book so that, presumably, your focus moves to Cromwellian England. How difficult have you found it to research another country and an earlier time-frame?

A: There is a wealth of information available about Charles I and Cromwellian England, so it was relatively easy gathering the necessary historical facts.  And because the second book is also a fictionalized account, I had a lot of latitude in describing the life of Thomas Carrier, a man who lived to 109 years of age, stood over 7 feet tall (according to Benjamin Franklin’s paper “Poor Richard” of 1735) and who, according to Carrier family stories, was one of the executioners of King Charles I of England. 

Q: Some historical fiction writers, like Sarah Waters, Matthew Pearl and David Ebershoff, add a note about their source material at the end of their books. Do you find this kind of information unnecessary in a work of fiction?

A: I did not include a list of source material for The Heretic’s Daughter and many readers wrote to me, asking me to give them ideas for additional reading on the subject of the Salem witch trials.  For the second book I will be including a selected list of source material because separating fact from fiction can be a very satisfying discovery; a sort of treasure hunt for the mind.

Q: Most writers enjoy a love/hate relationship with book critics. The Heretic’s Daughter has generated a fair amount of reviews which have been mostly favourable or highly commendable. As a beginning author how much attention do you give to book reviews? Will they change the way you write?

A: Being a first time author, it was tremendously gratifying to see such great reviews.  But from the beginning I tried to let my agent send me the reviews she felt were the most significant and I tried to ignore the rest, because really it has nothing to do with writing.  I didn’t read many of the reviews for the same reason I didn’t go into a commercial book store during the years when I was writing this first novel; it would have been very easy to talk myself out of writing a book with so many terrific authors already on the shelves.   Paying too close attention to other people’s opinions will change the process and, first and foremost, I think writers should write for themselves.

I’m very grateful to Kathleen for providing such honest and incisive responses. Women play such an important part of The Heretic’s Daughter that it isn’t surprising to find their significance in the book’s genesis. In stating “that bracing, accurate historical fiction can reveal so many philosophical, moral and cultural truths about our ancestors and our heritage that a dry recitation of dates and places cannot“, she aligns her writing with American authors, like Hawthorne, who have followed the history/fiction trajectory plotted by Walter Scott. Male authors continue to dominate the historical fiction genre and it’ll be interesting to watch Kent’s progress in this field.  

You can connect with Kathleen Kent on The Heretic’s Daughter page on Facebook  at http://www.facebook.com/thehereticsdaughter