Elizabeth Buchan Archives - Aspects of History

The Country House at War – Judith S. Lewis Interviewed

The author discusses her book with Elizabeth Buchan and tells of a serendipitous discovery, wartime requisition, eviction, and the stories she uncovered in researching the experiences of the British upper classes during the Second World War.

Judith S. Lewis

Welcome to Aspects of History, Judith. You say that your book took shape from a serendipitous tourist moment. What was that? I visited Audley End in Essex. Beautiful house, palatial in size. Capability Brown gardens. There was an exhibit about the war years, when the...

The Country House at War: A Story of Loss, Reinvention and the Birth of a New Britain, by Judith S. Lewis

A fascinatingly detailed history depicts how wartime hardship, requisitioning and profound social change transformed Britain’s great houses and irrevocably altered the world that sustained them.

Elizabeth Buchan

G.M. Trevelyan spotted it in September 1939. He feared, he wrote, that the England ‘of an old song’ was coming to an end. By that, as Judith S. Lewis explains in her account The Country House at War, he meant ‘a green and pleasant land presided over by intelligent and...

Woodspring, by Elizabeth Buchan

No doubt many have sat in their houses and wondered who lived there before them, what sort of lives they led. Woodspring, set in three parts, presents a chance to dig up those buried moments in time.

Carmina Gallus

Set in three parts, Elizabeth Buchan's latest novel Woodspring combines the stories of three separate people through its namesake – Woodspring House built in 1810. Though united in this way, each person and their part comes to Woodspring in their own way, and with...

Writing Woodspring

A multi-generational novel attests to the disruptions of war, social change and 21st-century Britain, each witnessed in the lot of a country house and the characters bound to it.

Elizabeth Buchan

Hitler believed in the Darwinian struggle for existence. Life did not, could not, exist without conflict. All too soon after his ascent into power, and initially, Europe got to experience the consequences of his grim and aggressive political beliefs. In Great Britain,...

AoH Fiction Book of the Month: Light of the Moon

Elizabeth Buchan on Light of the Moon: why she chose the SOE, set the story in Ribérac, and how research with surviving agents shaped her novel.

Elizabeth Buchan

Why did you choose the SOE as a subject for a novel?The SOE occupies a special niche in Second World history. How could it not? The brilliance of its founders who conceived and wrestled into it into being, its personnel, the agents and exploits, both successful and...

The Women of SOE’s F-Section: Researching for the Novel Light of the Moon

Elizabeth Buchan reflects on researching the women of SOE’s F-section for Light of the Moon and how their wartime experiences shaped her novel.

Elizabeth Buchan

After writing a novel about the French Revolution, my appetite for research had been whetted. Apart from family anecdotes – my father was at Dunkirk and fought in the desert and Italy - I knew shamingly little about the Second World War and decided to do something...

Episode 185

Elizabeth Buchan

The award-winning novelist discusses her writing, inspiration and the past.

Elizabeth Buchan

You’ve written about the major events of the 20th century, such as WW2 and the Cold War – the attraction of the period of history, or do go for character and plot first? They are closely allied! However, it wasn’t until I was a parent myself that I began to reflect on...

Nancy Wake: SOE Agent

How Far Would You Go To Do What is Right?

Elizabeth Buchan

At the outbreak of the Second World War, the charismatic and hugely attractive Nancy Wake was an Australian living with her French businessman husband in Marseilles. Immediately, she plunged into resistance work which resulted in her having to flee from France,...

Elizabeth Buchan

Elizabeth Buchan began her career as a blurb writer at Penguin Books after graduating from the University of Kent with a double degree in English and History. She moved on to become a fiction editor at Random House before leaving to write full-time. Her novels include the award-winning Consider the Lily and the international bestseller, Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman, which was made into a CBS Primetime Drama. Other novels include I Can’t Begin to Tell You, a story of SOE agents and resistance in wartime Denmark, The New Mrs Clifton,The Museum of Broken Promises, Two Women in Rome and her latest, Bonjour, Sophie, which will be published in April 2024.

Elizabeth Buchan

Books Click on any of the books covers below to either buy or get more information on Amazon Articles Click on the links below to read the full article[dpdfg_filtergrid custom_query="advanced" multiple_cpt="post,book_reviews" use_taxonomy_terms="on"...