Laker, Rosalind

(British, 1925– )

Laker lives with her Norwegian husband in Sussex and became a full-time writer of historical fiction in the 1980s. Begin with To Dance with Kings (1988), set at Versailles during the French Revolution. It follows the lives and loves of four women who have risen to Marie Antoinette's private circle. An unsuccessful painter's daughter is apprenticed to Jan Vermeer in The Golden Tulip (1991). Her career as an artist draws her into the connected worlds of patronage and political intrigue. Seventeenth-century London is the background to The Silver Touch (1987). It tells the story of a young woman silversmith familiar with both abject poverty and extravagant affluence in an era when both are conspicuous. Circle of Pearls (1990) is set in the Cromwellian period. The daughter of a royalist family grows to womanhood and marries her childhood sweetheart, Christopher Wren.

Norah Lofts, Mary Renault, Rosemary Sutcliff  DH