The Power of Presence—Walking the Roads Traveled by Your Historical Characters

Fictionalizing the lives of real people is a process of discovery and imagination. It’s filled with false starts and moments of clarity that slowly build toward a character who feels both true to the historical record and alive on the page. At some point, every historical novelist feels a jolt of certainty about a particular figure: This is the one. Why her, out of every woman that history has left behind? Each writer has an answer.

(How and Why to Create Your Own Walking Writing Retreat.)

I chose Swedish Countess Jacquette Gyldenstolpe, the central character in my novel Butterfly Games, for what seemed like a straightforward reason. Historians—mostly male—had reduced her life to a single dimension: She was the mistress of the future King Oscar I. She appeared in footnotes as a scandal, a cautionary tale, an inconvenience. I suspected there was more to her story, and I wanted to write the novel that history hadn't.

In the early days of drafting, my fingers flew across the keyboard. Jacquette’s story seemed to contain everything a historical novelist could want: a forbidden romance, a royal court steeped in intrigue, a secret child, and a young woman navigating power in a world designed to silence her. I wrote tens of thousands of words.

And yet, when I read those pages, Jacquette wasn’t there.

I had the events right. I had the setting right. But emotionally, something essential was missing. My heroine remained curiously flat, more concept than person. I had chosen her—but I didn’t yet understand her.

Two years and 4,000 miles later, that changed.

By the time I traveled to Sweden, I had already immersed myself in traditional research. I had translated Jacquette’s letters word by word. I had read memoirs written by her contemporaries. I had walked through Stockholm’s Royal Palace, where she served as maid of honor to the queen, and visited dozens of locations where she once lived and moved through society like a 19th-century “It Girl.”

Still, something wasn’t clicking. I needed more than facts and floor plans. I needed to understand Jacquette’s emotional foundations—the landscapes that shaped her sense of self before history ever noticed her.

In June 2019, I was granted rare permission to visit Finspång Castle in central Sweden, Jacquette’s childhood home. Through sheer good fortune, a Swedish friend arranged a private tour of the property, now owned by Siemens AG. No photographs or videos were allowed. I would have to rely on memory.

As my friend and I drove up the long castle lane, I began to sense what distinguished Jacquette from her peers. Finspång was built by her De Geer ancestor, a self-made Dutch Walloon industrialist who manufactured cannons. Unlike the grand Baroque estates of Sweden’s old nobility, Finspång was restrained, compact, almost informal. The women’s wing, which sat on the ground floor off the entry, seemed to be the heart of the manor house. This was the domain of the De Geer women, who were known for their independence and more-than-occasional scandals.

Artists and poets had been welcomed here. Their work lined the shelves and hung on the walls. This was not a household that prized rigid conformity.

Suddenly, Jacquette made sense.

I imagined her here as a young girl, sent to live with her Aunt Emilie during her parents’ bitter divorce, while Sweden itself teetered after a bloodless coup. It was from Finspång that she waved goodbye to Axel von Fersen, Marshal of the Realm, as he rode to Stockholm to face the mob that would murder him days later.

Wouldn’t a child raised in this environment feel displaced, emotionally unmoored, wary of authority, and yet hungry for connection? Of course she would. And in that moment, I understood why Jacquette was so drawn to Oscar Bernadotte, a young boy uprooted from France and transplanted into a foreign court to serve his father’s ambitions. Both Jacquette and Oscar had been reshaped by forces beyond their control.

Travel didn’t give me new plot points. It gave me the characters’ souls.

Inside one of Finspång’s sitting rooms, my corporate host—a German woman recently retired from Siemens—watched me closely as I studied a mother-of-pearl necessaire. The lovely box had a lid painted with a miniature of Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, and its sides were adorned with scenes of Finspång. Inside were the things Jacquette treasured—embroidery tools, a manicure set, writing accessories. I couldn’t tear my eyes away. After a long pause, my host folded her arms, nodded once, and whispered, “Jacquette’s.” The box probably is the work of Balthasar Wigand, an Austrian painter who had a workshop in Vienna, where Jacquette’s husband served as the Swedish minister.

But in that quiet moment at Finspång as I gazed inside the box, Jacquette ceased to be an abstraction. She had owned objects. She had made choices. She had inhabited these rooms that shaped her expectations of freedom and constraint.

When I returned to my manuscript, I rewrote large sections—not to add description, but to recalibrate motivation. Jacquette no longer behaved as the “fallen woman” history expected her to be. She acted like someone raised in a household where women spoke freely, observed power closely, and learned early that love and security were never guaranteed.

This, I realized, is what travel offers the historical novelist. Not just accuracy, but context. Presence allows us to absorb the textures of a place—the light, the scale, the silences—and translate them into emotional truth on the page.

You don’t need to visit a setting to write about it. But when a character refuses to come alive, when the research feels complete, but the story remains inert, travel can provide the missing dimension. It reminds us that history happened in real rooms, to real people, who carried their childhoods with them into every decision they made.

Walking Jacquette’s halls didn’t just change my novel. It taught me how to listen—to place, to character, and to the quiet clues history leaves behind for those willing and able to search.

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