Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton Read Free Page A

the next three years, King-Hall spent winters in the Sudan and (wives being forbidden from remaining during the hot season) split her summers between London and Ireland, where her husband’s family lived. When not in the Sudan, she continued to write, both novels and journalism, and when a family inheritance allowed Patrick to quit his job, they returned to live in Chelsea. Her first son, Richard, had been born in 1930; her second son was born seven years later, and a daughter three years after that. In 1938, the family moved again, this time to County Down in Northern Ireland, to run a farm close to the Perceval Maxwell family home. It was here, after producing only three modestly successful novels during the 1930s, that King-Hall entered her most prolific period of authorship, and that she wrote
Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton
– the novel for which she is most often remembered today.
    During the 1940s, packages of books would regularly arrive at their Irish home from the London Library, which supplemented her own library to form the basis of her research. According to her son, Richard, her method of composition was remarkably relaxed: she did not insist on scholarly isolation, instead writing longhand, in pencil, while sitting in the company of her family, if they were at home. However, the children were looked after by an Austrian nanny, and later sent away to boarding school, so she did have time to herself to devote to writing.
    In 1953, the family relocated again, to County Waterford in Ireland, where King-Hall continued to write quite prolifically. In the late 1950s, however, she began to manifest signs of Parkinson’s Disease, and the last of her twentybooks (seventeen novels and three non-fiction works) was published in 1962. Following the death of her husband Patrick in 1968, Magdalen King-Hall spent the final three years of her life living with her son Richard’s family in King’s Langley, Hertfordshire, and she died in Hemel Hempstead hospital on 1 January 1971.
    King-Hall’s works were always historical novels, though there was ostensibly little consistency or pattern to her choice of subject matter – unlike her friend and contemporary Margaret Irwin, for example, best known for her
Young Bess
trilogy of novels about Queen Elizabeth I. Like Irwin, however, her attention was inevitably caught by stories of women – the character of Barbara Skelton has a forerunner, for instance, in her novel
Lady Sarah
(1939), which fictionalises the life of the notorious eighteenth-century aristocrat, Lady Sarah Lennox. King-Hall was inspired partly by locations with which she was familiar – several of her novels have an Irish setting – but more commonly she would read widely in history and folklore and keep her eyes peeled for interesting stories which she might embroider into fiction. At the time she wrote
Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton
, King-Hall had no direct knowledge or association with Hertfordshire, though she would end her life there. Indeed, she transplants her protagonist’s home from Markyate in Hertfordshire to the fictional Maiden Worthy in Buckinghamshire, just across the border.
    Her facility at embellishing the kernel of a good idea can be seen in
Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton
. The account of the Wicked Lady legend in Hole’s bookis only one page long, summarising the version of Ferrers’ life drawn from Cussans. The considerable flesh which she attached to these bare bones emerged almost entirely from the imagination of King-Hall, and the endurance of the legend into the twenty-first century owes much to the richness of her invention.
    The success of
Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton
was perhaps no surprise, as King-Hall was by this stage of her career an experienced and skilled popular historical novelist. The genre in which she worked has not always been afforded the critical respect or attention that it deserves,