Thoughts on Women's History: 2004 Online Women's History Month.

If you want to know why Sandra Worth chose her particular approach to Anne Neville and how she made some of her historical decisions in writing about the personal agonies caused by the Wars of the Roses, you can talk to her directly online during March.

Brian Wainwright is a male writer who writes amazingly strong women characters (in his first novel, Alianore Audley and in his second, Constance) but his approach to them varies. Alianore Audley lacks the high seriousness of Constance - and has a great deal more fun in her life.

Are there differences in writing a romantic tale, as Worth has, to writing high politics or high comedy, like Wainwright?

Sophie Masson takes another view entirely - she combines history with the fantastic. Does the introduction of magic elements change how she views and writes her historical stories? Does she use the same basic approach as the other authors, or are there radical differences?

And how does the description of an important female historical figure through the eyes of a man affect the narrative in Wendy J Dunn's writing?

Dunn is also active in presenting information about the Tudor period to the wider public, so it will be interesting to see the issues she has faced in presenting the women in her history.

Unless we understand how our fiction writers present the history we read, we lack a dimension in understanding that history. This is a rare opportunity to meet a group of writers online, and to talk to them about what they choose to present and how they go about it.

All of this leads to another big question. How do different approaches to history mesh?

What happens when the historian meets the fiction writer meets the fiction publisher meets the living history re-enactor.

Controversy happens.

History in the university environment is very different to fictional history. Elizabeth Chadwick, Tamara Mazzei and I have decided that the only reasonable way to get to grips with the ivory divide is to talk it out.

We want to understand that strange gap between most scholarly history and the history non-historians chat about over coffee.

Please come and join us online in March 2004 - bring your thoughts and knowledge and arguments and favourite books. Share your thoughts with us. Share your knowledge with us. Argue!

Whether you are new to women's history or have taught in a university

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