avg_rating: 3.69
name: Annelisa Christensen
about: Born to a Danish mother and French father (who I discovered to be French, English and Scottish when I did our family tree), I've always considered myself European, though my heart remains in England. Every time I fly back from a holiday, my breath catches when I see the miles and miles of patchwork quilt of green fields and forests. It isn't until we land, I remember the green comes from so much rain. Still, I love it.I first remember sitting as an eight-year-old writer at our dining room table on a rainy Sunday. My dad's old reel-to-reel tapes played crackly post war songs and classical music, the perfect background to my writing mood. I had recently read Heidi, and was obsessed with goats - drawing them, writing about them and giggled as Born to a Danish mother and French father (who I discovered to be French, English and Scottish when I did our family tree), I've always considered myself European, though my heart remains in England. Every time I fly back from a holiday, my breath catches when I see the miles and miles of patchwork quilt of green fields and forests. It isn't until we land, I remember the green comes from so much rain. Still, I love it.I first remember sitting as an eight-year-old writer at our dining room table on a rainy Sunday. My dad's old reel-to-reel tapes played crackly post war songs and classical music, the perfect background to my writing mood. I had recently read Heidi, and was obsessed with goats - drawing them, writing about them and giggled as I had Clarabelle, a mischievous, escaped goat butt a middle aged woman pegging out the washing through a sheet.Since then, I've written hundreds of stories, or parts of stories, never finished them until I did the NaNoWriMo thing. A month of writing every day, of putting aside everything else to finish a book. I knew exactly what story I wanted to tell. It was based on a recurring dream I'd had over the years and needed to get out of my head. It was the first of my magical realism series The University of Lights . Since then, I wrote, or part-wrote, another six novels in the series, holding onto them, because I want the backstory to be the same in all of them. They are as yet unpublished. Writing that first one, though, was an eye-opener: Not only could I finish a book, but I remembered how I loved writing and wanted to do more of it.So, then, a few years ago, I was indulging a passion of mine - old books. I became caught with the idea of buying a piece of a 300 year old book of trial transcripts I had spotted on Ebay. I couldn't afford the whole of one. If I had known how much it would change my life, I would have paid so much more. But, at that time, I only wanted to hold pages of such an old book. I won the auction.The pages arrived in special acid-free cellophane, inside a card-backed envelope, which I opened as fast as I could, and with as much respect for its frailty as it deserved. With awe, I pulled it from the cellophane and tentatively held the edges. The pages had survived over 330 years. I dreaded I would be the one to tear or destroy them. I read the first page. It was the trial of Elizabeth Cellier, a seventeenth century Catholic midwife - charged with libel by king and country - who was denying having written and published the book.It wasn't long before, still mindful of the delicate nature of the paper, I was turning pages one after the other, dying to know what would happen next. I was hooked. This woman was amazing. I loved how she spoke out against the court, and refused to be bushwhacked into admitting she wrote the book, determined to prove her innocence. She was bold, seemingly fearless. And she seemed to be ably defending herself against the charges, perhaps with knowledge of the law.Once I was caught in Cellier's world, I found she was the subject of other research, but in three different fields of interest: as having involved herself in the Popish Plot of 1678-81, as the author of a book/pamphlets and as a midwife and the proposer of the first midwife college in Britain. My book, The Popish Midwife is the culmination of years of research and writing. It is an exciting story. I had to write it.While researching The Popish Midwife, I discovered a group of women of the seventeenth century, who seemed to have stood out as forerunners of modern women. They had strength and wisdom that beg me to write about them too. So, I continue to write the se ...more