Dorothy Dunnett would have loved this

[ellenkushner]

Thanks to frostokovich for bringing this to our attention:

I begin with a little known story retrieved from the archives, that sheds some intriguing light on a piece of long-buried Elizabethan history. In the Beyazit Devlet Library in Istanbul is a document in Turkish, which contains an account of an exchange of gifts between the rulers of England and the Ottoman Empire in the 1590s. . . .

Comments

[avirr.livejournal.com]

That has Dorothy written all over it! Very cool! Woman-to-woman backchannel! In fact, she may have seen the letters, because the article mentions that Susan Skilliter brought them to light in the 60s.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

The rest of us will just have to love it for her.

[paulakate.livejournal.com]

Dunnett probably did use it; a friend of mine found an antique book of early Tudor play fragments in the library at UCLA that included the dramatis personae of the play with all the L's.

[safirasilv.livejournal.com]

The wild thing is that something similar appeared in a romance novel by Bertrice Small, published in the 1980s. The details were altered, but the Kira who is eventually murdered in a coup and the request for makeup were there...I'd assumed the latter was pure invention, but apparently the author had done extensive homework to create the background for this fun but definitely fluffy novel.