I can see myself in junior high school standing by the bookshelves near the section holding Shakespeare and English history and some historical novels. They were metal shelves, I think, and the covers of the books danced before my eyes. I can feel myself so clearly about thirteen years old, sloppy and uncaring of what I wore, with the noise of other girls in the distance. There was a sacred space about me and those yet unread books. I can still feel it intensely. I borrowed those books and, by the age of fifteen, had read all of Shakespeare. I wrote also, some two or three dreadful historical novelettes, one about pirates. Then I put it all away until my middle years when it came flooding back with great passion, and I began to write the series of novels set in 17th century England which would be published and, while doing this, add to my accumulation of history books so they are now immeasurably more in number than the ones I borrowed from my school shelf many years before.

There are people who are extremely content in the present. For them, the past is vague—a nebulous place of covered wagons, hoop skirts, or perhaps knights in armor—and they are not particularly interested in it. Then why was it so real to me?

In the late Brian Moore’s marvelous novel, The Great Victorian Collection, a Victorian scholar dreams such a vivid dream of the booths of the mid 19th century London Great Exhibition that when he awakens he finds it has physically manifested itself in the parking lot below his hotel and it will not go away. To me, his circumstance is perfectly plausible. I am much possessed by other worlds, so much so that I am remarkably startled to find myself in this one. I live so much in London’s 17th century that sometimes I am rather amazed at the electrical lighting in my house, or the hot water which comes splashing at the turn of a knob from my faucets.

Why are any of us so drawn to the past? And yet, it is an extraordinarily wonderful thing if one happens to be a historical novelist, for you have then the gift of recreating the world you see within you, not only for yourself, but for as many who happen to read it. We remake this world to our liking; instead of retreating into another world alone, we ask innumerable people to see it as did the scholar hero of Moore’s book.

As a child, uncomfortable with the world in which I found myself, I began in my mind to create others. In it I squirreled away countless bits of history (the shape of a medieval door in a museum, a recipe for peacock, the texture of a shoe, the hint of a song written in 1598 and the sound of a lute playing it) and these somehow became combined with a story richly filled with my own feelings. I was already drawn to all things of historical England and, in my heart, I was Francis Hodgson Burnett’s little princess, riding in a horse-drawn cab through the pea-soup fog of Victorian London with the yellow lamps glimmering on the cobbles.

The question is, what of this comes from outside and what from within ourselves? Do we, as historical novelists, wholly create these worlds out of scraps and patches of research and sew them into something which had not existed before? Do we create them with needle and thread, or do they already exist and call to us, and what is within, and what without? In a museum, something draws me: a 16th century ink pot perhaps, and standing there before it, a story starts to form. In moments, it is complex. In another part of the museum there is a 17th century wood stair mounting up to where? And who comes down it? If I am still enough, I hear running feet and all sorts of conversations.

In some strange way, I become the characters. I pass a mirror expecting to see them and stand still in amazement to see only myself. Once, I was writing a scene from the point of view of a big Edwardian man, and when the door opened suddenly, I stood up in shock. I felt a sense of ripping pain and fright. I had hurled myself from his muscular masculine body to my little feminine one without having the chance to take leave of the other.

How real their worlds are to me! I was in the last few weeks of writing my novel about the young Shakespeare and visited the 16th and 17th century English rooms of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Walking on the hard-wood floor in the quiet corner, I felt not my footsteps but his...he was going into that house, the house of his patron and lover the Earl for the last time, to bring him the copies of all the sonnets he had written for him, and to end all the tearing things between them. For three weeks after I finished the book, I heard those footsteps: they were mine, they were his. Then, returning home from some weeks in Europe, I went to sit quietly on a weekday afternoon in one of the medieval cloisters in New York City brought stone by stone from across the sea and reassembled, listening to the splashing of the small fountain and discreet, taped music of plain chant rolling over the 14th century pillars, leaning against one with a notepad balanced against my knees, writing again and again the name of the hero of my novel trilogy, Nicholas.

“I live there,” I tell someone who admired how very real is my sense of character and place. “I’m just visiting this century,” I say. I smile, and wonder if she knows how deep is the truth I have spoken.