I have seen one or two favourable comments about Jean Plaidy's books in the Philippa Gregory thread. My husband has been listening to one of hers as he drives to and from work, and liked it a lot. I think it was called St Thomas's Eve, or similar, and was about Thomas More and his five daughters. I gather favourably disposed to More. My husband said it was well written, interesting and something like it had integrity. I've forgotten his actual phrase. His next read, an Australian novel set in western Australia, has been less impressive with stereotypical characters (poor Irish immigrants leaving home, etc) and cliched events, and boring writing. He said there was no comparison between the two.

I have always assumed Jean Plaidy was a rather romantic light historical writer and I haven't read her. Should I? Would her style still seem modern or is she dated a bit?

And a query. Though one of the daughters is called Eve, that doesn't seem to be the reference in St Thonmas's Eve in the title. And neither of us know the significance of it. And he wondered what happened to More's bright daughters in later life.

When Eleanor Hibbert wanted to descend into popular romance she became several other persona, Victoria Holt being the one who most stuck to historical backgrounds. The rest of the time she was Jean Plaidy and delved less superficially into historical themes, and I always found those ones interesting, informative, good storytelling and well written. I learnt a lot of history from EH/JP in my youth, and also how to identify (and disregard) departures from factual history in the interest of producing a well rounded story.

St Thomas's Eve is the 20th December and was a night when one's dreams, it was believed, could be engineered to reveal future fortune, especially for young women in the matter of matrimonial prospects. If one was lucky one also got a sneak preview of heaven - if one was headed that direction of course.

Interesting quote I found from Hibbert which maybe Ms Gregory and a few others could do well to pay heed to; "As Jean Plaidy I have always felt I was writing for the true lover of history - a reader who knew the facts better than I but was hungry for an insight that they might have missed and which it was my conceit to provide. Such an insight would have been fraudulent if I invented history to shape it, and none of my readers would have appreciated it. I take it therefore as an extreme compliment that so many have suffered to read my explorations into their domain and not find too much fault with my facts."

Yes, that's good, isn't it? I never know the facts, so distorting them doesn't usually bother me too much. (Overseas writers writing about NZ often get things wrong which is a little irritating. Mostly obvious things, like talking of South Island and North Island when they are the South Island and the North Island. I'm not altogether fond of novels which have Chinese men marrying NZ women in the 19th century either, since that was very unusual.)

I had forgotten about Victoria Holt, and never really knew Eleanor Hibbert. I don't think I have read her as Victoria Holt either. Our library system has 12 Victoria Holts and 22 Jean Plaidys and no Eleanor Hibberts. (Spread out over 5 libraries.) And quite a number are out at the moment, I see.

Thanks for the info on St Thomas's Eve. I think I found out the date but couldn't see much of what its significance must have been.

I don't believe she ever wrote as herself. Has your library any Philippa Carrs? That's another of her personas which was quite popular (she had a whole army of them).

I know I read St Thomas's Eve as it was part of her Tudor series and I read them all but I don't remember it so well. Was a marriage of one of the girls a part of the story?

Long ago,Jean Plaidy introduced me to 'The Middle Ages.' This was a missed out period in my schooling time and peopled with card board cut out illuminated page people until then. from her I learned of John of Gaunt all the goings on which made sense of what came later and what I did know better. I kept this interest in her writing very quiet to avoid scoff from the better read. However, am pleased to come out of the history closet and proclaim how much I enjoyed most of her work - even the gothic Holt stuff. I tried again recently but sadly could not recapture my first thrill of discovery because by now I know a bit more, I guess.

Eleanor Hibbert wrote under 8 pseudonyms, would you believe. Jean Plaidy, Victoria Holt, Phillipa Carr, Eleanor Burford, Elbur Ford, Kathleen Kellow, Ann Percival and Ellalice Tate. I've only ever heard of the first three!

Quite creative in the name making up, wasn't she? I swear the hardest part of writing is discovering your characters' names - finding a pen name that suits is a bit easier but hers were really diverse. Some authors chose names that will sit close by well known others on the library/bookshop shelves. I imagine there is quite an art in this because too high or to low is no good. I once played about with this in a library and moved good books closer to sought after authors - having moved some of their stuff away - and found it worked. I could get people to pick up something different that way. The librarian in charge was not best pleased with me but said I was right.

Well if Priscilla is going to come out of the Eleanor Hibbet closet I feel I should too... as a young man studying engineering at university it wasn't really the thing to admit to reading Jean Plaidy and Victoria Holt ... even my mother, a confirmed Plaidy and Holt fan, categorised them just as historical romances. I enjoyed them though and I think they were good at imparting a genuine historical interest in the areas they covered... I also seem to recall she, Plaidy, went to some lengths to explain when and why she occasionally deviated from recorded documented fact, and also where she was just making a plausible story to fill the gap... and of course sell books.

But until now I never knew that Jean Plaidy and Victoria Holt were one and the same person. Well there you go - one learns something new every day.

And Mary Renault's greek stories... I read all those as a teenager. If one's coming out one might as well bring along all the dirty washing too... Isn't that the done thing to do these days?

And especially here one learns something new everyday MM! And I've just learnt of Mary Renault, who I'd not heard of before so I'll look into her work now.

"The King Must Die", "The Bull from the Sea", I'd forgotten those.

Renault was good, and got me to "The Villa Ariadne" by Dilys Powell (and a belief long held that only women could translate history)

In the past I've enjoyed both Jean Plaidy and Mary Renault. If my memory serves me right they wrote about different periods of history? Jean PLaidy Medieval and Tudor; Mary Renault Greek and Roman.

I still consider the best history authoress to be the American - Sharon Penman, though.

I liked the one Sharon Penman I read (Here Be Dragons) but found some of her archaic language irritating.

Nordmann, my husband says the book was about his four daughter and one son - I had that wrong - and their marriages do take up a reasonable amount of the book. He said St Thomas's Eve was brought in specifically near the end, something to do with More's death. But More died in July, so I can't make sense of that.

Apart from Victoria Holt and Jean Plaidy, we don't have any books in our libraries by her other names. I guess the Philippa Carrs have been weeded since her name is quite familiar. (It's a small district and has a fairly small library system.) I have remembered another reason I haven't read her: at the library in the townb where I lived for the first twenty years of our marriage they charged 50c for books that were light, and more literary books were free. (All non-fiction was free.) I don't understand now why I refused to get out any that cost, since we could easily have afforded the price.

Caro wrote:

He said St Thomas's Eve was brought in specifically near the end, something to do with More's death. But More died in July so I can't make sense of that.

Henry (and/or Cromwell) chose July 6th for More's execution. It was a significant date. More had guessed when he would die and "on reflection he relished the idea" (John Guy). In the liturgical calendar July 6th was the eve of the anniversary of the day that the bones of St. Thomas Becket - another Catholic who had defied his king - had been restored to Canterbury Cathedral. For an honorary member of the Mercers' Company, whose patron saint was Becket, it was the most important festival of the year. In his final letter to Margaret, his beloved daughter, More wrote this (does Plaidy use his words, I wonder?):

"I cumber you good Margaret much, but I would be sorry if it should be any longer than tomorrow, for it is St. Thomas Eve and the Utas of St. Peter, and therefore tomorrow long I to go to God; it were a day very meet and convenient for me..."

PS The "Utas of St. Peter" is perhaps also significant.

The feast day of this saint is June 29th and the "Utas" - the eighth day after a feast day - was July 6th. The utas was traditionally a day of festivity and merriment and thanksgiving.

I'm not sure that everyone would agree with this, but it was believed that More was dying to vindicate the rights of the descendants of St. Peter (the Bishops of Rome, as Henry would contemptuously call them). More's death on that day was therefore most appropriate and was a cause for joy, not grief. Clever clogs Cromwell perhaps overlooked this: More didn't.

Ah, so England had two St Thomas's Days then! How did they distinguish between the Becket and the Doubter if the former was simply known as "St Thomas's" eve and day, do you know?

Didymus's feast day was July 3rd (I think), so his Eve would be July 2nd.

The July 6th/7th dates for Thomas Becket were officially for the celebration of "The Feast of the Translation of St. Thomas of Canterbury":

http://thirteenthcenturyengland.wordpress.com/2012/07/07/the-translation-of-thomas-becket/

I'm a good Protestant, so I could be up a gum tree with all this.

All these feast days and then the utas or utis* (the jollifications eight days later) - no wonder Cromwell was keen to abolish them all. Really bad for the economy.

More also was aware (got this from Guy) that the July 6th/7th St Thomas's feast day and eve had been special for his great hero, Cardinal Morton. He made it a public holiday (presumably only December 29th had been one before).

*Shakespeare mentions "the old utis" in Henry IV Part II. I'll try and dig it out.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=EHEoAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA294&lpg=PA294&dq=utis+or+utas&source=bl&ots=t64d7wn84k&sig=asni0g--DCCEqMpm7r4X1VF1IrI&hl=en#v=onepage&q=utis%20or%20utas&f=false

Act II sc iv scroll down to the notes at bottom of page 294.

Caro - there *were* definitely two St. Thomas's Eves; I've checked it this afternoon with someone who knows more about these things than I do.

St. Thomas the Apostle - Doubting Thomas, aka Didymus, the "twin" - feast day July 3rd *after* 1968. Before that his feast day was 21st December and St. Thomas's Eve was indeed 20th December (when girls put onions and all sorts of things under their pillows and hoped to dream of their possible suitors), but that clearly is *not* the St. Thomas's Eve that Thomas More mentions in his final letter.

St. Thomas Becket *did* have two feast days (I thought John Guy and Richard Marius had probably got it right ): (1) 29th December (the day of his murder) and, as mentioned above, (2) the Feast of his Translation which was July 7th. St. Thomas's Eve was July 6th, the day of More's execution.

Very confusing all these feasts and all these Thomases. I wonder if 28th December was also a St. Thomas's Eve? I suppose it must have been. I forgot to ask that.

John Guy's book, "A Daughter's Love", is all about Margaret Roper, nee More, and it is excellent. Guy is a Fellow of Clare's College Cambridge, so he's to be trusted (I think!).

Thank you for all that, Temperance. I do wish quite often that some of these Thomases could have given different names and then I might have a little more clarity about who's who. Why would they have changed the feast day of Thomas the Apostle in 1968, do you know?

I have never heard of utas or utis before. Hard to see that there could be times in Britain when there wasn't some festival or other taking place, if you celebrate most saints' days AND the time 8 days after (and perhaps the in between days). Or did only some saints' days be the subject of actual festivities?

I have a feeling my knowledge and/or impressions of Thomas More might be highly influenced by A Man for All Seasons. (Or what I remember of it from this distance in time.)

But all that makes sense of the title. Thanks.

Caro.

In the Catholic and Orthodox calendars (it would have been no different in the past) every day of the year is dedicated to some saint or other, usually more than one a day. It does not mean that every single one is celebrated with a holiday and feasting, normally just a church service at best or a passing mention at worst. No-one but the clergy would have a clue who half of the saints were or what they were supposed to have done anyway.

It is only those saints deemed important to christianity or to a local area that will have significant celebrations and sometimes a holiday to mark the day.

Mention of Jean Plaidy takes me back to the '60s she was my first skirmish into history novels. I read everything of hers then I was thinking "what now" I cant remember but something must have come along. I remember when I lived in Perth she came out on a ship from England and called in on her way to Sydney. She only used the Jean Plaidy name on that occasion

Now I have just finished my latest, what a revelation! "Bring up the Bodies" a great book, and I think Hilary Mantel and Thomas Cromwell has one book left, I await it with eager anticipation.

Caro - the Vatican moved the date for Thomas the Doubter's feast day because the December date apparently interfered with something called the "ferial days of advent". Haven't a clue what they are. St. Jerome had apparently mentioned July 3rd in connection with Thomas the Apostle, so that's why that particular date was selected. This happened (according to Wiki) in 1969, not 1968 as I was told.

Gran - I knew you would like it! I've just re-read it and I'm now half way through Wolf Hall again. Oh, the sublime Mantel!

Islanddawn wrote:

In the Catholic and Orthodox calendars (it would have been no different in the past) every day of the year is dedicated to some saint or other, usually more than one a day. It does not mean that every single one is celebrated with a holiday and feasting, normally just a church service at best or a passing mention at worst. No-one but the clergy would have a clue who half of the saints were or what they were supposed to have done anyway.

It is only those saints deemed important to christianity or to a local area that will have significant celebrations and sometimes a holiday to mark the day.

Eamon Duffy in "The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580", disagrees with you, ID, but I won't bore you with the details. Perhaps it was just an English thing, all the prolonged jollifications? Any excuse to stop work and start drinking.The English are notorious for taking advantage of holidays - give them an inch (one day) and they take a mile (two, three or more days extra). Bank Holiday "weekends" can go on from around lunch time Friday and last until Wednesday, and the Festive Season - which used to mean Christmas Day and Boxing Day off work - now starts around noon on Christmas Eve and lasts (for some people, not all) until January 2nd. It is an absolute disgrace and should be stopped. I think Thomas Cromwell was probably a Daily Mail reader.

What does Duffy disagree with Temp? That every day of the year is dedicated to the memory of a saint? Which is what I meant when saying it was no different in the past.

But I'm confused now, are we referring to now or then? I can't say I would blame the average person in the past for grabbing a holiday if the opportunity presented itself though. Without the fair labour laws (that we take for granted these days) governing working hours, conditions, health and safety, or pay I'd be looking for any excuse for a day off too. The lower classes must have loathed the changes the Reformation bought, all that dour work, worship and then more work with very little relief.

Today is another matter entirely, of course, and that is what I was referring to in the last part of my post. I should have made that bit clearer, sorry.

As a Plaidy aside, I noted on the Wikipedia page (info which has now of course disseminated throughout the internet) that Eleanor Hibbert was buried at sea. She definitely died on a cruise ship between Greece and Egypt in 1993 but could it be true that they dumped her overboard?

I found her biography on one of her publishers' websites and it simply states that the lady was extremely private and therefore stated in her will that her funeral arrangements never be made public. This would suggest that she at least had the benefit of probate before this wish was enacted, hardly something that could have been arranged on the high sea (and anyway would it be legal for a cruiship company to do so?). Also she had a huge affection for her base in London so it would make sense that she would wish to have been interred in the city too. In any event the bald assertion as reproduced by Wikipedia seems a strange one indeed.

Anyone in the London area who might want to go Hibbert-hunting? Canning Town (birthplace) or Chelsea might be good starting points.

According to this link, details of her death and burial were never made public;

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=27588814