For me, the right names convey period. Almost any names is possible in any time and place, but some are a lot more likely. We wouldn’t expect an Edna to be a teenager, or a Tiffany to be in a nursing home. Both are possible, but if we do the equivalent in our novel we have, as Lucy’s husband used to say, some ‘splaining to do.

As a reader, an unexplained, glaringly wrong name is like a fork shrieking on a plate all the way through a book. However, some accurate names just aren’t going to work. I have a page of medieval names called Fancy a hero called Bogo.

While we should, in my opinion, avoid names that only occurred after the period of our book, we definitely can use names that are out of our characters’ past, as people often do today when naming a child. An explanation might still be necessary, however. For example, the Anglo-Saxon names of my Malloren family - Elfled, Cynric, Brand, Hilda, Argenbryght, and Beowulf are explained by their father having a deep interest in the family’s Anglo-Saxon roots.

What do you think about character names? How important is it that they fit the time and place, or is it more important that they sound comfortable and right to modern ears?

For British names and titles, I recommend looking over a large-scale map, especially of the area where the family originated. You’ll probably find village names that appeal to you, or can invent one on the same lines. Place names definitely have different patterns in different parts.

I decided that my hero of A Lady’s Secret would be from Huntingdonshire, one of the counties reorganized out of existence, so he was the Earl of Huntingdon, which was an amusing connection with his name, Robin. But then I stumbled across the fact that the ancient name of Huntingdon was Huntersdown, and I like that, so he’s Earl of Huntersdown, and the Robin Hood connection is buried more deeply.

So the right period details will enrich our work, we should always remember that we are interpreting for modern readers, some of whom don’t know a lot about the past, and also that all historical fact is fiction of a sort. Thomas Carlyle described history as a “distillation of rumour” and George Orwell said, “History is written by the winners.”

So we gather as many threads as we can and weave our own honest cloth. There will never be enough threads, so in the end we have to work in the floss of our own invention in order to present to our readers that delightful tapestry called historical fiction.

This has been fun. I hope you’ve found it useful. You can see the results in practice in A Lady’s Secret, and there are excerpts up, starting here. By contrast, I also have some reissued out in April. Two of my early Regency romances will be reissued together as Lovers and Ladies. I’ve learned a lot since then, so when I looked over the page proofs I spotted a number of errors, but I decided not to fiddle. They are what they are, and still pretty good books, in my opinion. There’s more here.