Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

Summer Reading Recap

by Leave a Comment

A hectic month may sadly disrupt my writing productivity, but reading is one thing that never entirely goes away. In fact, I’m even more inclined to reach for a good book as comfort or refreshment during a rocky day or week. For instance, the day after Bär got hurt, when we’d been up till two in the morning the night before and it was all we could do to make meals and keep our eyes open, my own method of coping with the exhaustion and left-over stress was to devour A Shilling For Candles by Josephine Tey in the course of the afternoon. And yes, I thoroughly enjoyed it and I actually remember what it was about. All the rest of that week, pretty much all I did in my spare time was read. Books are such a blessing. 

My summer reading list (as usual) ended up being a starting-point: over the past three months, the number of books I’ve read that weren’t on the list actually exceeds the number that were on it. Here’s my original list, updated with some review links:

Cluny Brown by Margery Sharp
Escape the Night by Mignon G. Eberhart
The Ivy Tree by Mary Stewart
Storming by K.M. Weiland
Where There’s a Will by Mary Roberts Rinehart
Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope
Moccasin Trail by Eloise Jarvis McGraw
Greenwillow by B.J. Chute
Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener
Conagher by Louis L’Amour
The Great K&A Train Robbery by Paul Leicester Ford
When Books Went to War by Molly Guptill Manning
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

Seventeen by Booth Tarkington

I finished everything on here except the titles struck out (though I’m still working on When Books Went to War). Greenwillow was an inadvertent casualty: my library system discarded their only copy before I could request it! There always seems to be at least one book on my list each year that I can’t manage to get hold of during the summer. I didn’t finish Tales of the South Pacific, and never started Romeo and Juliet. Shakespearean tragedy was one thing I did not feel up to. But meanwhile, since the beginning of June I’ve also logged this variety of titles (not counting research books, which are a topic for another day), which range from okay to good to very good to great:

Good-Bye, My Lady by James H. Street – good
Picture Miss Seeton by Heron Carvic – very good (hilariously so)
Back Home by Eugene Wood – good
A Branch of Silver, A Branch of Gold by Anne Elisabeth Stengl – very good
Before Lunch by Angela Thirkell – okay
Greyfriars Bobby by Eleanor Atkinson – great!
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen – re-read, naturally great
Information Received by E.R. Punshon – okay
Five Magic Spindles by multiple authors – very good
Cotillion by Georgette Heyer – okay
Rest and Be Thankful by Helen MacInnes – very good (I’ll review it someday, I promise!)
A Shilling For Candles by Josephine Tey – very good
Max Carrados by Ernest Bramah – okay to good
Shirley by Charlotte Brontë – re-read, quite good
The Weight of the Crown by Fred M. White – okay to good
Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers – great!
Traitor’s Masque by Kenley Davidson – great!

drawing a deep breath at the end of August, I can only repeat: thank heaven for good books.

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Historical Settings I’d Love to See in Books

by 10 Comments

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is a great one—either ten historical settings you love, or ten historical settings you’d love to see in books. I decided to go with the latter. My picks may wobble back and forth over the line between “setting” and “subject,” but it’s close enough, isn’t it? They’re not in order, just roughly categorical.

1) Westerns set in the early 20th century. A lot of Westerns nowadays seems to lean toward an 1870s or 1880s setting (which is perfectly fine), but when I began reading early Western fiction I was surprised to find a lot of it was set around the time it was written: from the turn of the 20th century up to the beginning of WWI, and even on into the early ’20s. It’s an interesting dynamic—the mingling of increasing modernity like automobiles and telephones with a still-existent frontier—and it’s a lot of fun to read.


2) Cavalry westerns. Here’s a branch of the genre that doesn’t seem to have been explored half as far as others. In film the cavalry western is a recognized subgenre, and some short-story writers have tried it, but how about some novels featuring soldiers and their families on frontier outposts?

3) Far west theater of the Civil War. I’m most familiar with the eastern campaigns of the Civil War, and enjoy reading about them, but I can’t help thinking there must be a lot of unexplored material for good stories in the events of the war in places like Texas, Missouri and Kansas—states that were divided in sympathies and also possess a frontier element to the setting.

4) More Great Depression fiction, but not just about the Dust Bowl and migrant workers. How about exploring the impact the Depression had on average middle class families from the farms and small towns of New England and the Midwest? (Bonus: what was the Depression like in other parts of the world besides America?)


5) Edwardian-era fiction set in small towns and among more middle-class characters. Most authors seem drawn to the glamorous heights of Gilded Age high society, and you can’t really be surprised or blame them, but I’m always interested in the everyday life of a given time period, and it would be nice to see more good novels with that kind of setting.


6) Victorian or Edwardian novels set in the Alpine countries of Europe. We’ve had our fair share of stately English manor-houses (and even American ones) in this era—and I’m just crazy about the gorgeous mountain scenery of Alpine countries like Austria, Switzerland, and even France and Italy. Wouldn’t it make a wonderful background for a historical novel?


7) Classy mysteries set in the 1940s. Basically I wish some author could capture on the page the atmosphere that makes the ’40s one of my favorite decades of classic film—the world of fedoras and trench coats, posh apartments and elegant evening gowns, taxicabs and telegrams—without it being merely a hard-boiled spy thriller or a cheap imitation of film noir. (Attempting this myself is a writing pipe-dream of mine.)

8) Pacific theater of World War II. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that the European front gets a lot more attention in fiction. I’ve read a lot of deeply interesting nonfiction about the Pacific that seems like it would make great material for stories.

9) Fiction set in the 1940s that isn’t necessarily about WWII—novels set in the post-war years, or home-front stories where the war merely forms a background. Basically I just like this decade as a setting…


10) Upstate New York. Now, this is a pretty personal pick, since I’ve lived here all my life. Though it’s an area rich in early American history, the only historical novels I’ve encountered with a real upstate setting are Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and Kenneth Roberts’ Rabble in Arms. Plus in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the city of Troy was a thriving manufacturing city teeming with industry and a destination for European immigrants. It’s just waiting for someone to make a fascinating novel out of it.

Of course, being a writer myself,  I’ve toyed with all of these as “someday-ideas” with varying degrees of seriousness…so if a few years down the road you see a book in one of these settings under my name, you heard about it here first.

What are some historical settings you’d like to see more of?
Historical photos from Pinterest; Alps and Catskills from Wikimedia.

My Year in Books

by 3 Comments

Comparing my record book with my Goodreads shelves, I find I read 92 books this year. As always, that number includes novellas, Kindle Singles, individual long poems, et cetera. Twelve titles, however, were cover-to-cover re-reads of books I had previously read. Highlights there included re-acquainting myself with Jane Eyre after many years, and re-reading my two favorite Booth Tarkington novels, The Magnificent Ambersons and The Turmoil. A couple of childhood favorites were also on that list: Little Women (for a read-along at The Edge of the Precipice) and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess.

You can see my full list here, but here’s the main highlights:

Rather to my surprise, there’s only one “classic” novel on my list for this year, Anthony Trollope’s The Warden, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I’m delighted at the prospect of many more Trollope novels to work my way through. My other forays into the classics came in the categories of plays and poetry. I continued my journey through Shakespeare with Macbeth and Hamlet. Other plays read included the absolutely charming Quality Street by J.M. Barrie, and Watch on the Rhine by Lillian Hellman, which I felt was rather better than the movie version, being more restrained and less whack-you-over-the-head-with-its-message. In poetry, I enjoyed G.K. Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse and fell in love with Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” but must admit I bogged down midway through his Idylls of the King. I don’t know quite why; I didn’t dislike it, but it doesn’t seem to have the same rhythm and flow of his other poems I’ve read. I was also enchanted by a volume of letters between Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which left me with a resolve to explore both of their work. So far I’ve just read Elizabeth’s beautiful Sonnet 43.

2015 became The Year I Finally Got My Hands on Angela Thirkell’s Books. I’d wanted to read Thirkell for years, having once randomly picked up a later book in her Barsetshire series and loved it, but my library system had a slim selection and none of the early titles in the series. But they’re now being released on Kindle—hooray! Besides High Rising, which made my top-ten list, I read Wild Strawberries, Summer Half and August Folly, with Summer Half being my favorite of those.

I find I didn’t read many short stories this year. Flappers and Philosophers by F. Scott Fitzgerald was local-color “research” for writing a Jazz Age story, and was as mixed a bag as I usually find Fitzgerald. I did read a couple of Western collections: The Western Writings of Stephen Crane, which held a couple of impressive pieces and a number of merely interesting ones, and New Hope by Ernest Haycox, a collection that showcases two distinct styles: light pulp fiction and “serious” short fiction—the latter quite good. Didn’t read too many other Westerns, but Partners of Chance by H.H. Knibbs, The Man Called Noon by Louis L’Amour and Stand to Horse by Andre Norton were decently good.

History-wise, I read two books on World War II in the Philippines, We Band of Angels by Elizabeth M. Norman and Rescue at Los Banos by Bruce Henderson; and circling back to the book and film that first piqued my interest in the subject, Behind the Scenes of They Were Expendable by Lou Sabini and Nicholas Scutti. (I leave the nonfiction subtitles to fend for themselves this year.) In theology, I was introduced to the works of G. Campbell Morgan, which are brilliant and which I highly recommend; so far I’ve read his books on the gospels of Luke and Mark. Other nonfiction was mainly bookish miscellany: Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon, Talking About Detective Fiction by P.D. James, and a couple of literary-themed Kindle Singles, I Murdered My Library by Linda Grant and Disappearing Ink by Travis McDade. Also How the West Was Written, Vol. 3: Frontier Fiction Glossary by Ron Scheer, which is terrific both as a reference book and a glimpse into history.

I read quite a decent amount of mysteries, highlights being The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey, Death of an Airman by Christopher St. John Sprigg, and Five Passengers to Lisbon by Mignon G. Eberhart. Somebody at the Door by Raymond Postgate was a technically impressive and interesting mystery rather spoiled by distasteful elements in the story; The Nameless Thing by Melville Davisson Post was as unusual and philosophical as Post’s books usually are, and Lord Peter Views the Body by Dorothy Sayers was an amusing though uneven collection of short stories. Mainly to be enjoyed by those who are already die-hard fans of the Lord Peter series.

I disappointingly hit on just-middling entries from two favorite authors this year, My Brother Michael by Mary Stewart and Railroad West by Cornelia Meigs. But I did find some good ones from both new and familiar authors! To wind up, a selection of novels and novellas in varying genres that I particularly enjoyed: Howards End by E.M. Forster, The Aviator by Ernest K. Gann, King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard, The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope, Pied Piper by Nevil Shute, The Prince of Fishes by Suzannah Rowntree, The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge, and Come Out of the Kitchen! by Alice Duer Miller.

Previous years’ reading roundups: 2014, 2013, 2012.