The Outrageous Oriel

The Outrageous Oriel (she is named for her father's Oxford College) is chatteringly candid. In fact Oriel takes after not only her maternal grandmother, Valerie (of Mistress Malapert) but also—in some ways—her paternal grandmother the Dowager Lady Heath. And when in 1641 she goes to the court of stubborn, vacillating, always-unwise King Charles I and his passionate and irrrational wife Queen Henrietta—well a lot of people are not pleased. Including Oriel when she meets the man her father has selected to marry her.

Now available online from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or at your local independent bookstore (order through Baker & Taylor and Ingram, book distributors).

Notes from Sally:

By the way, if King Charles should seem at times to resemble any current head of state—well, that's the way he was. As Anna Russell said of one of Wagner's operas, "I'm not making it up you know!"

Alas, you must be braced for the cover. The publisher asked me to send a suggestion for their illustrators. So I suggested a simple outline background of Whitehall Palace with King Charles or one of his courtiers glaring at a young woman, all dressed al la 1641.

What I got was some sort of time-warped tea party. (Remember, tea was first drunk in England—by very few adventurous souls—in 1650: tea as a ceremony much later.) There was this female in a Victorian bonnet and Jane Austin mitts on a sort of throne, a Queen Anne era maid holding a modern silver tea pot, and two midgets in George II powdered wigs with queues, long William-and-Mary coats and mid-calf socks that belong to no era I can think of. One was holding a Chaucerian fool's cap in his left hand, and for some reason had his right out of his sleeve, stuck out from beneath the coat to kiss Victoria's mitt, while a cross between a fox terrier and a white rat cavorts in the foreground.

I said that was unacceptable. They asked, astonished, "Why?" and so I told them. They seemed unimpressed. I said that I spent months making sure I had no anachronisms in the text, and would not be happy with eight or nine of them on the cover. They said the English always have tea. I said not in 1641 they didn't. They said what did I expect them to do? I said pay attention to the suggestions, use the sketch I sent, and look up proper costumes. They said, oh they never did that sort of thing; there was just sort of a reservoir of assorted pictures and the illustrators just picked what they fancied.

When I recovered from this, I suggested that I do a sketch for them. They said fine, and be sure I had the right size. Not astonished at this point at the implication that their artists couldn't even adjust size, I obeyed. Kept it simple. Just heads. Very crude of course: I'm no artist.

You know what they did? They used it for the cover!

In any event, I love you all--and hope at least some of you will love my Outrageous Oriel.

Sally