Angelica Kindle edition is launched
My new book, ‘Angelica’, is now available in a Kindle edition, and will be published in paperback during August 2020.
News
Angelica arriving soon
My new novel is arriving in August 2020. Angelica is a fictionalised autobiography of the painter Angelica Kaufmann, one of the two female founders of the Royal Academy. This is a novel about an artistic genius and a powerful woman living, like us, at a time of huge and bewildering change.
Read more about the book at the Barbican Press website.
View the cover
Writing The Bedlam Trilogy
Miranda's reflective essay "Writing The Bedlam Trilogy" has appeared in the journal Neo-Victorian Studies, general issue 12:1 (2019). You can read it here.
Writers Who Inspire Me
In a short audio piece for the Royal Literary Fund, Writers Who Inspire Me, Miranda introduces one of her literary heroes: 'Virginia Woolf's fiction explores the inner lives of intelligent women with courage and originality; she searched for, and found, a way of telling a story that was different.'
Listen here →
When Memory Distils Into Fiction
In her latest piece for the Royal Literary Fund's online magazine Collected, Miranda describes how a troubling encounter in childhood has remained with her, surfacing recently as she reflects on a new direction for her writing.
A Self Among the Crowd
Miranda’s short essay about the novelist Patrick Hamilton, The Man Who Invented Gaslighting, is published in a new anthology by the Royal Literary Fund, A Self Among the Crowd.
Brixton BookJam September 30th
I will be reading from The Fairy Visions of Richard Dadd at this event, between 5 and 6 pm.
Here are the plans for this so far. Come Together will be in the St Matthew’s Garden and Windrush square, in Brixton, and we’ll have a tent / mic / tables etc, as well as a bookshop. Come and find the tent near the church when you arrive.
Brixton BookJam will be curating some great writers and creative activities at Brixton Come Together on 30th September. There will be writing and illustrating workshops, and readings from up and coming South London writers.
Look out for the Brixton BookJam tent in St Matthew’s Garden - next to Windrush Square.
A History Girl
Once a month I blog for The History Girls. Here’s an excerpt from my latest blog, about the vagaries of elections in eighteenth century England.
I’ve spoken to several friends who feel that there have been too many elections lately and that voting, far from being a privilege, is a bit of a bore. It’s worth remembering that in this country women didn’t get the vote until 1928, there was no secret ballot until 1872 and until the Reform Act was passed in 1832 voting was a very different experience. You had to be a male freeholder with an income of at least forty shillings a year - about 250,000 men. Voting was by a show of hands and each man had to go to the Returning Officer and register his vote. If you lived in the country, as most people did, the local Squire could scrutinise the poll book to make sure his tenants voted the ‘right’ way. If necessary the candidate’s agent would take voters to the polling booth and bribe them with beer and beef.You can read the full post at The History Girls blog.
My other hats
In addition to writing novels, I work as a reader and mentor for The Literary Consultancy. This is fascinating work as I really enjoy reading new writers’ work.
I’m also a Consultant Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund, running workshops in various universities to encourage clear academic writing and discourage waffle and jargon.
Hello and welcome
Hello, everyone, welcome to my new website and blog. I really welcome feedback on any of my books so please feel free to get in touch.
King of the Vast, Part 3 of my Bedlam Trilogy, will be published later this year and I’m currently working on my ninth novel, which is set in Rome and London in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
