Not sure about the influence there

[oursin]

Thinking further about my mention of Anya Seton's Katherine as Important Reading Influence of my teenage years, I was at first tempted to go 'And that, children, was what turned me into A Historian!'

And then (are we surprised?) I realised that it was All More Complicated, and that if I recollect correctly, it was actually recommended to me by my parents when I had already done something in the way of having an outstanding mark in a history exam.

(I would have been, what 13? 14? at the time. 'It was a more innocent age....')

Anyway, that certainly set me on a track of reading historical novels - I do suspect that these came under the 'wolfskins and togas' getout clause that Naomi Mitchison remarked on when she came up against barriers in writing fiction with a contemporary setting -

As far as I recall, I preferred medieval to Tudor settings, also real historical rather than made-up characters, but I read a good deal more widely than that.

I don't think there were any books/authors who had the same effect on me as Katherine - none of Seton's other books had the same effect, come to that -

Maybe Renault, The King Must Die?

I could not read most of these works now - in fact, while I was devouring Jean Plaidy's oeuvre during my schooldays, I remember picking up one that my sister was reading when I was home during vacation from uni and not feeling it at all.

But I had acquired quite a lot of Useful Historical Information by this means, and was able to be commendably impressive during an inspector's visit to our history class on the basis of having very recently read Plaidy's highly-coloured accounts of the French court during the era of Catherine de Medici and her offspring.