I came across an audio interview with Lara Parker last week where she mentions having a rather "Dickensian" childhood, something I had never heard before. She doesn't use the tern "Dickensian" herself, but I think it fits when she tells of having spent several years in a boarding school because her mother didn't have time to raise her. I noted a catch in her voice for just a moment; in fact, she sounded extremely tired and unguarded throughout the interview. She talked about a large, oversized woman who would always seize a child to use as a living cane or walker and dig her claw-like fingers into the child's shoulder and lean on the child to walk (Lara was one of her victims). Lara said she wrote about her boarding school experiences under the guise of her character Victoria Winters in her last DS novel, "Heiress of Collinwood." She said everything she wrote about really happened to her.
I am considering ordering this novel if only to read that section. You can read a preview of the opening of the novel on amazon, and her writing is very good, though I didn't care for many of the ideas she came up with for "Angelique's Descent," so I never read any of her subsequent novels (though I think I bought the second one).
As someone mentioned on this forum during one of DS's runs on the Scifi channel, it must have been around 1998, Reverend Trask's Worthington Hall in the 1897 storyline is modeled after the boys' school Dotheboys Hall in Dickens' "Nicholas Nickleby."
If anyone reading this has read Lara's book, I would be interested to hear your comments about this aspect of it.
The interview with Lara was nearly an hour but I found was well worth listening to. She mentions (in a bemused way) Jonathan Frid and Grayson Hall as being theater snobs. Her comments on Joan Bennett show she had both respect and sympathy for Miss Bennett with respect to the latter's somewhat chagrined attitude about working on a daily soap opera.
