From the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century: a guest post by Nancy Hayes Kilgore

Nancy Hayes Kilgore is here today with a short essay about shifting to a new historical era, and what happens when a potential story idea just won't let you go.

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From the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century

Nancy Hayes Kilgore

Four years ago I was immersed in the 17th-century world of Isobel Gowdie. The most famous of the Scottish women tried for witchcraft, Isobel lived in a world of drudgery and fantasy. Or was it fantasy? A peasant on the land of a Scottish laird, she used herbs and magic to cure diseases and to spite her enemies, and she could fly in the “Otherworld” of fairies and elves, where she had great powers and consorted with the Devil.

Milford House Press (2021)

The Scottish Reformation was a time of social change, religious wars, and changing belief systems. The reforming Presbyterians wanted to eradicate what was then a widespread belief in that “Otherworld” and in magic, which in their minds included Catholicism as well as folk religion. Heading towards a rational theology and the Age of Reason, which was of course controlled by “the rational sex,” men, they targeted the powerful women who used magic and herbal cures (and curses). They named them witches, tortured and killed them.

Isobel Gowdie’s life and trial took place in this fierce, violent, and passionate milieu. And I, who had been a lackluster history student in school, became fascinated with the era, as well as with Isobel’s story. Differing beliefs, clashing and intersecting, and an amazing cast of characters, held me, a feminist, yogi, Presbyterian minister, and therapist, in thrall and provided continual fodder for the multi-layered novel that became Bitter Magic.

I finished Bitter Magic and launched it into the world. Phew! I thought. Enough novel writing.

But then I started sorting through a trove of letters from my grandmother in the 1910s. I became intrigued with the life of Florence, this grandmother I never knew. A young woman with tuberculosis, she was feisty and ambitious, a staunch feminist, a budding concert pianist, and her letters to my grandfather, her “comrade” but not yet a suitor, burgeoned with tantalizing elements for a novel – her adventures at a ranch in New Mexico, her train journeys, her music, and her paramours.

Sunbury Press (Sept. 2025)

When I began writing the story of Florence, another question, another dimension emerged: my mother’s life as a young woman in the 1940s. My mother, Flossie, never knew her own mother, Florence, who died of tuberculosis when she was born. How did the two lives interrelate?

I’d long been attracted to the idea of a dual-timeline novel, and here it was. After lots of research about those two time periods and lots of drafts, Pennsylvania Love Song emerged.

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Nancy Hayes Kilgore is the author of four novels: Pennsylvania Love Song, Bitter Magic, Wild Mountain, and Sea Level. Awards include the Vermont Writers Prize and a Foreword Reviews Book of the Year.

An ordained minister and pastoral psychotherapist, Nancy leads workshops on writing and spirituality. She lives in Vermont with her husband, dog and cat.