Green Darkness

"Green Darkness was written in 1968 by Anya Seton. It’s a time-slip novel with reincarnation as its central theme. A group of people gather in an old farmhouse near historic Midhurst in Sussex for a weekend in the country, but there are chilling undercurrents beneath the social interaction. As the plot unfolds, the reader realizes that all these people are reincarnated from characters who lived in the area at the time of Wyatt’s Rebellion in the 16th century. The story is based around the actual discovery of a skeleton walled up in a fourteenth-century house called Ightham Mote in Kent. This book is about how the skeleton came to be there. As the story progresses, the conflicts of the Tudor period are resolved in one way or another in the modern age. Yes, but the greater part of the book is set in the mid-16th century, and it’s the most accurate and vivid account that I’ve read of Wyatt’s Rebellion, which was a revolt against Mary Tudor. It’s utterly gripping."

"I love this book. I was absolutely bowled over by it. There’s a lot of mystery to it. A group of people convene in Kent for a house party in the 1960s. It turns out they are all reincarnations of people who lived in Tudor times, in the reign of Edward VI. It’s all linked to the legend of a walled-up body, a skeleton that is said to have been found in Victorian times at Ightham Mote in Kent. You have to work out who was who in a previous life, with all the dramas and tensions of their earlier existence being played out in the modern world. It’s a magical, brilliant book. I recommend it too because it’s also got one of the best descriptions of Wyatt’s Rebellion that I’ve ever read in history or fiction. A lot of people, including me, came to history through fiction. I’ll finish a novel then go shooting off into the history books. Some don’t. That’s why I think it’s important to make it as accurate as possible. Some history books are readable as novels, but academic history can be quite dry. That’s the rigour of research, which is why many like their history fictionalised."