Joyce Ravid/submitted "Sunrise of Avalon" author Anna Elliott.

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Photo courtesy Anna Elliott

Joyce Ravid/submitted "Sunrise of Avalon" author Anna Elliott.

 

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Anna Elliott is well versed in the lore and legends of the Dark Ages.

“Sunrise of Avalon,” the final book in the historical fiction and fantasy novelist’s Twilight of Avalon trilogy, was released in September. Elliott of University Park studied English and medieval history in college and has long been a devoted fan of the Victorian novel.

“I wrote a Victorian American novel for my senior thesis in college,” she says. “It was a natural pick for me to write a historical novel. It was a setting I knew well. [The novel] was nothing that I would want to publish, but I fell in love with the process. From there, I kept writing every day.”

Elliott says writing her first novel was a long, tedious process.

“I had been shopping my novel around, and I got an agent, which was huge, but then she decided to quit being an agent,” Elliott says. “I was five months pregnant and we were living on my husband’s grad student stipend. I couldn’t really see [writing] as a career and felt I had gone back to square one.”

The idea for the trilogy came to Elliott in a dream a short time later.

“I had studied medieval history and the Arthurian legends, so I kept reading and reading them and realized again how much I love that era,” she says. “I started writing frantically, trying to get as much done as possible before my daughter was born.”

Elliott finished the novel when her daughter was 7 months old. A few months later, she had signed a three-book contract with Simon & Schuster.

To build her own story using elements of the Arthurian legends and the history and folklore of the time period, Elliott says she immersed herself in research.

“One of the challenges is that there isn’t that much known it’s called the Dark Ages for a reason,” she says. “A lot comes from the archaeology of the time. The evidence is fascinating. In a way, [the time period] is great because it gives a novelist a lot of free reign, but on the other hand, it’s hard to hunt, and there’s not a lot to go on.”

“Sunrise of Avalon” follows the legend of High Queen Isolde and Trystan, a mercenary with a lonely and troubled past, in early 500s Britain. Throughout the first two books, the protagonists endured a perilous journey to keep the underhanded Lord Marche from the throne of Britain. In “Sunrise,” they face new missions, deep-rooted secrets and the trials of their own forbidden love.

“It’s a romantic legend. I love the romantic aspects of [the trilogy],” she says. “The relationship building across the three books, taking these sort of damaged people and how love can transform them.”

A romantic at heart, Elliott says depicting the Dark Ages inevitably meant she would have to explore unfamiliar territory brutality and bloodshed. She used modern day studies to help her understand the realities of war.

“The Dark Ages was a very brutal time; there was constant war and fighting,” she says. “It was difficult, but if you are going to write about that time, you have to be close to it. Almost all of the men of the book are warriors.”

Elliott viewed many interviews with army officers and the stories of service men and women returning from Afghanistan and Iraq.

“I read about and watched videos that showed how combat affected them psychologically and emotionally and worked that into my character development,” she says. “Even though the technology of war is much different now, the emotion of war is the same.”

Isolde and other women in the novels are healers and seers, so she also studied the stories of women nurses who had served in Vietnam and World War II.

“Then, like now, war affects not only the warriors but the entire society,” she says.

Elliott graduated with a degree in English from Pennsylvania State University in 2000. She now writes full time, and homeschools her two daughters. Straying a bit from the medieval era, Elliott also penned the Victorian-era novel “Georgiana Darcy’s Diary: Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ Continued” and its sequel. Another book in that series will be released in February, she says.

While the Twilight of Avalon Trilogy was published by Simon and Schuster, Elliott says she chose to self-publish the “Georgiana’s Diary” series and may do the same with other contemporary novels she has in the works.

“It’s a really interesting time in the publishing industry. And it’s an interesting time for authors we have more options now,” she says. “Working with editors was wonderful and the books would never be what they are if not for them. I still have my agent and am happy about my next project, but you don’t have to [go that route] these days.”

mcortez@gazette.net

“Sunrise of Avalon,” Anna Elliott, Simon & Schuster, $16