Learning from the Experts: Elizabeth Peters

I've loved the Amelia Peabody mysteries from Elizabeth Peters, and waited eagerly for the next one. I was rather disappointed to learn this time that the delay was due to her death in 2013 at the age of 85.

Barbara Mertz writes under the names Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels. She wanted to be an archeologist, and studied Egyptology, which ultimately inspired her Amelia Peabody mysteries, the story of a very strong minded Victorian woman working as an egyptologist in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I love Peter's gentle sense of humour in the story of this Victorian woman who refused to allow social strictures to prevent her from living her life as she wanted. Peters clearly used her love of archeology, and the knowledge from her studies to write these novels, and this gives them a ring of authenticity, and echoes the advice to 'write what you know.'

Peters is an avid reader, a trait that she shares with almost every writer I've written about in this series. It was when she started thinking that she could write better than some of the books she was reading, that she started to write. She didn't meet with immediate success, seeing a round of rejections of her first novels. She persevered, writing until she found her voice, and a publisher. In one of her interviews she says:  "I had not found my voice. It's a rather pretentious terms, but I think it's true that there's a certain kind of thing that each person does well, and you can mess around trying this and trying that." As with most things in life, practise makes perfect, and as a writer, you need to persevere, and hone your skills.

Peters says she is not very organised, so never kept a rigid schedule, but she balances this by saying "Inspiration is all very well, but it will never replace sheer dogged determination." Writing is hard work, and it takes work to achieve success.

Peters was a character, and her voice is clear in her work. She's a great loss to her readers, and I for one, will miss the next Peabody adventure. I'll end with a quote from her obituary in the Guardian which gives insight in to why she'll be missed:

"She often said that writing the Amelia Peabody books allowed her to be an archaeologist from the comfort of her armchair. Surrounded by cats - and cats always featured in her Peabody books - she lived in a farmhouse in Maryland, which was much admired for its extensive gardens. She had a reputation for loyalty and generosity to her fellow writers and was known for her enthusiasm for cigarette smoking and drinking neat gin."