Hello, friends! I am thrilled to welcome Heather Moll back to Diary of an Eccentric today to celebrate the release of Nine Ladies, a novel that combines Pride and Prejudice and time travel. Doesn’t that sound fantastic? Heather is here to take you on a tour of Bakewell, which is featured in the novel. Please give her a warm welcome!
Hello Anna and thank you for welcoming me back to Diary of an Eccentric! Today I’m going to take your readers on a tour of some of the real places mentioned in Nine Ladies. Now, I know what some are you are thinking: “Heather, I heard this story has time travel. What is real about that?” While you may not be able to travel through time 200 years by standing in a stone circle during certain solar events, the places that our modern Elizabeth visits before she goes back in time to meet Regency Darcy are real.
I finished the manuscript for Nine Ladies in 2018, and in 2019 I visited Derbyshire with a dear friend for our own Elizabeth Bennet tour. Bakewell was our home-base and it’s also where Elizabeth is staying in 2011 when Nine Ladies opens.
This is Bank House on Bath Street in Bakewell. When Darcy rode through Bakewell in 1811, it was a girls’ school, but by the time Elizabeth comes to England it was converted into 3 flats, and she’s renting the second one from Professor Gardiner.
Elizabeth’s friends from Sheffield decide that she needs some cheering up after her father’s death and they come to spend the weekend with her. They leave her flat and walk toward the town center to have breakfast. They pass the Rutland Arms, an inn built in 1804. Jane Austen is believed to have stayed here in 1811.
By the way, I had an amazing sandwich at the Lambton Larder. Nice name, right?
Elizabeth and her friends, Charlotte Lucas and her sister Maria, Willie Collins, and Missy King, then take a bus to nearby Haddon Hall.
Haddon is a 900 year old manor house that is still a private residence and one of the only houses in England that has remained in one family’s ownership. It was empty throughout the Georgian and Victorian era while the family lived elsewhere. When Elizabeth visits Haddon in Nine Ladies, she’s not impressed by the Tudor and Medieval styling, but she does like the terraced walled gardens.
Later, her friends have to decide to visit either a Bronze Age stone circle or the ruins of a Georgian-era home. They decide on the ruins, but the stone circle stays in Elizabeth’s mind.
Of course, they have to finish the afternoon with a Bakewell pudding. This is my friend’s dessert because I ate mine too fast before it even occurred to me to take a picture of it.
After her friends leave, Elizabeth decides to see the Nine Ladies stone circle herself. She walks to Stanton Moor and sees the real Nine Ladies, a stone circle that’s 4,000-years old.
In Nine Ladies, if you stand in the center of the stone circle at sunset on an equinox—in the 21st century—you’ll go back in time 200 years. The one-way portal opens again on a solstice, and anyone inside will move forward in time from the 19th century to the 21st.
I stood in the center of that stone circle for a while, but I didn’t go anywhere. No regency men for me. But if you read Nine Ladies you’ll find out what happens when a 21st century Elizabeth goes back in time to meet 19th century Darcy.
About Nine Ladies
The Darcy family has grudgingly kept the secret about the power contained within a nearby stone circle called Nine Ladies. Fitzwilliam Darcy is forced to contend with this secret when a young woman from the future appears at Pemberley. Until the opinionated stranger can return to when she belongs, Darcy is responsible not only for her safety, but also for ensuring that nothing she does threatens Pemberley’s well-being.
Elizabeth Bennet has returned to England to take care of her estranged father, and her life was off track long before she walked into that stone circle at sunset. She quickly discovers that, as a poor and single woman, she’ll have to rely on the arrogant Mr. Darcy. She tries her best to survive in the nineteenth-century until she can return home but, as she and Darcy grow closer, the truth she knows about his and Pemberley’s bleak future becomes harder to keep.
How can Darcy and Elizabeth overcome 200 years of differences in this era-spanning love story?
Buy on Amazon
About the Author
Heather Moll is an avid reader of mysteries and biographies with a masters in information science. She found Jane Austen later than she should have and made up for lost time by devouring her letters and unpublished works, joining JASNA, and spending too much time researching the Regency era. She is the author of Nine Ladies, Two More Days at Netherfield, and His Choice of a Wife. She lives with her husband and son and struggles to balance all of the important things, like whether or not to buy groceries or stay home and write. Visit her blog and subscribe to her newsletter for a freebie and monthly updates. Connect with her on Facebook, Goodreads, Instagram, and Twitter.
Giveaway
Heather is generously offering a giveaway of 6 ebook copies of Nine Ladies as part of the blog tour, open internationally. This giveaway ends on February 13. You must enter through this Rafflecopter link. Good luck!
Thanks, Heather, for being my guest today, and congratulations on your new book!
Diary of an Eccentric 