The best Victoria Holt books I ever read were On the Night of the Seventh Moon, The Love Child, The Witch From the Sea, and The King of the Castle. I started reading novels by this iconic author when I was only ten years old and I’ve never stopped. Sadly, she has now passed away, but she wrote so many books that once you read through them all, you can start all over again. They are always threaded in between whatever other books I may be currently reading.
She also wrote under the pseudonym’s Jean Plaidy and Philipa Carr, and the magic was present in those books too. The Daughters of England series–sometimes called the Cornwall Saga–by her pseudonym Philipa Carr were my absolute favorites by her.
When I was writing Hot Winter Sun and Cold Summer Wind I prayed to be half as good as her on her worst day. Naturally, no one touches this incredible author, but I always wondered why more writers did not adopt her style. It certainly wasn’t because she was not popular, since she was the queen of romantic suspense and the queen of true historical fiction for decade after decade. The reason I emphasize “true” is due to the way the genre seems to have changed and degenerated into something it was never meant to be.
I don’t disrespect anyone who enjoys Rosemary Rogers or Joanna Lindsay, but those books are not exactly historical fiction, let’s face it. In Sweet, Savage Love, the central theme was rape. Sorry, but it was. In every way, shape and form, unfortunately. Just one violent scene after another, leaving me to wonder where the whole romance part of the historical romance was. I also have nothing against Joanna Lindsay, but her books are not historical fiction, they’re erotica. Nothing wrong with that, but I think we should start classifying some of these novels properly.
Something that always intrigued me was the way historical fiction writers, such as Holt, could literally take you and set you down in the middle of another century, and put you into the minds of the characters to such an extent that if they walked into the room, the first thought you would have would not be “wait, these people don’t exist.” Rather, it would feel like a perfectly natural occurrence. Victoria Holt had a way of making people so alive and so real that you felt as if they MUST have truly been there at some point in time.
Whether she was writing in first person, which she did quite a bit, or third person, you were there in the room feeling every emotion. These days, it seems like that technique has been replaced with one of two things; sex & violence or over-the-top descriptive writing. I know the former will never wane in popularity, and the latter is here at least for a little while. Nevertheless, I’m in that category of people who get bored with both those aspects of writing. We all know how sex works, and who wants to read about violence? I think we get enough of that on the nightly news. And don’t misunderstand me, Victoria Holt didn’t whitewash time periods or relationships. She just did it in a way that the point of the scene wasn’t how graphic she could get it, but just an accurate description of what was happening, whether lovey-dovey or rough-and-tumble. That, to me, is a far better technique.
As far as descriptive writing, I suppose it’s just a matter of personal taste. I like the settings to be real, but I certainly don’t need to read three paragraphs describing a leaf. It gets boring. I lose interest. I want to scream “enough already!” I swam upstream with my novels in that regard because I gave just enough description to set the scene, then moved on to what was in the hearts and minds of the players. I believe there’s a lot of readers out there searching for that and can’t find it, because as always, everybody copies the trend, and now you can read 100 books and they all sound like the one before because every author is trying to “out describe” the next one. *Sigh*
It really made me miss the Victoria Holts, the Belva Plains and the Phyllis A. Whitneys who really knew how to tell tales without filler. Check out this page from MacMillan about Holt and if you’ve never read her books, give them a try. They’ll be around for a long time! https://us.macmillan.com/author/victoriaholt