Out Now! Elizabeth St.John - COURAGE: Tales of History, Mystery and Hope

 e-book & paperback from Amazon

 https://mybook.to/COURAGE-Anthology

or order from any good bookstore

Today we feature 

ELIZABETH ST.JOHN

The Gate by Elizabeth St.John

London, 1900

When desperation is the only option and courage costs everything...

trailer/animation by Jean Gill (A.I. generated)

cover graphics by  www.avalongraphics.org

(some stories have an adult content others a 'you will need tissues' warning) 

Fifteen short stories about Courage

featuring authors:

  Alison Morton 

The Sentry - Noricum AD 395

Derek Birks 

The Saxon - Southern Britain AD 471

Marian L Thorpe 

The Phoenix - a fictional country circa AD 900

Judith Arnopp 

Siflede - London 1066

Annie Whitehead 

Daisy Chain - England 1141

Anna Belfrage 

Stepping Between - England 1308

Carolyn Hughes 

Confronting Plague - England 1361

Patricia Furstenberg 

Kate’s Letter - Transylvania 1478

Amy Maroney 

The Portrait’s Secret - Paris 1536

Jean Gill

Legacy - England 1558

Cathie Dunn

Darkness Rising - Venezia 1923

Helen Hollick 

A Taleteller’s Tale - The Caribbean 1709

Elizabeth St.John 

The Gate - London 1900

Antoine Vanner 

A Sack of Potatoes - The Netherlands 1954

Kathy Hollick-Bater 

Grumpy Old Grandfather – Anywhere, Present-day

with an introduction by

Lorna Fergusson

About Elizabeth's story
The Gate

Pitman Street

In the winter of 1900, a woman stands at the gates of Lambeth Road Workhouse with her two children and makes the hardest decision of her life.

The Victorian workhouse is designed to be a last resort: deliberately harsh, intentionally humiliating, a place so bleak that only the truly desperate would choose this refuge over the streets. For a widowed mother with no wages, no family, and no options, it is the only thing left between her children and starvation.

Margaret Anderson knows the cost. She knows they will be separated, children from mother, brother from sister, and housed in wards governed by bells and silence and the systematic erasure of everything personal. Worse, she has no way of knowing if or when they will come out, or whether the children she retrieves will be recognisable as the children she had committed.

The Gate is fiction rooted in documented truth, inspired by real lives and extant records that still survive in the London archives. It asks a question that no document can answer: what does it feel like when the only path forward is one that terrifies you? When you cannot know if you are saving your children or simply losing them more slowly?

Fear is the gate. Courage is to step across the threshold.

Why I wrote The Gate

Some stories find you. This one ambushed me.

I have spent my writing life with strong women, about ancestors who lived centuries ago, whose courage I admired from a safe historical distance. Women whose lives I could research, fictionalise, and honour without it touching the bone. This story is different. The Gate is two generations away. My grandmother is the one who walked through it.

When I discovered that Harriet had spent her childhood in the London workhouse system, I sat with the documents for several months before I could write a word. The admission papers. The transfer order moving two small children between institutions like items in a ledger. The silence that followed, the years of archive gaps where a family should have been. And underneath all of it, Harriet’s mother Margaret, a woman who had lost everything and still found the courage to do the one act left to do.

What stopped me wasn't the history. It was the proximity. Harriet was my grandmother. Her silence about those years, which she carried to her grave, folded into the family like something shameful rather than something extraordinary, is itself a testament. It tells you everything about what survival cost, and what it required you to leave behind.

Researching this story, I travelled to a workhouse with my daughter. We walked those halls together: the stone corridors, the high cold windows, the bleak yards where children exercised, and I tried to place my grandmother there. A girl of ten. Alone. Without her mother. She would not leave me, and I could not leave her.

Standing in that yard, my daughter turned to me and said I was the most resilient person she had ever known. I looked at her and replied: you are. I understood in that moment that we are both simply doing what Margaret did, and what Harriet did after her, carrying forward what was passed to us, without always knowing it was being passed.

Margaret's courage was not spoken of. It was simply lived, and handed on, silently, to every woman who came after her. To write this story is to finally say out loud what the family never could.

She was extraordinary. And she deserves to be known.

read a snippet from

The Gate by Elizabeth St.John

London, 1900

When desperation is the only option and courage costs everything

The pot had nothing left to give. Margaret scraped the last of the congealed oats anyway, the spoon going round and round the cold iron. The fire had been dead since Tuesday. She stopped looking at the hearth two days since, the ash piled grey and spent like old rags.

“Mum, you’re up early.” Harriet woke first, as Harriet always did. She opened her eyes with that look she had, like she’d been awake already, waiting in the dark. There were times Margaret watched that little face and felt observed by someone much older than ten, someone who understood the shape of things and did not question.

“That I am,” Margaret said. “Wake your brother.

About Elizabeth:

Elizabeth St.John’s critically acclaimed historical fiction brings to life the stories of her ancestors—extraordinary women whose close connections to England’s kings and queens offer an intimate perspective on Medieval, Tudor, and Stuart times.

Inspired by family archives and historic residences from Lydiard Park to the Tower of London, she explores ancestral portraits, diaries, and lost gardens—and occasionally encounters a ghost. Exploring a whole different family history in The Gate, Elizabeth expands her storytelling into the early 20th century, adding a new era to her repertoire.

Living between California, England, and the past, Elizabeth is International Ambassador for The Friends of Lydiard Park and curator of The Lydiard Archives, where she is always searching for inspiration for her next novel. Her works include The Lydiard Chronicles, set during the English Civil War, and The Godmother’s Secret, exploring the mystery of the princes in the Tower. In The King’s Intelligencer, set in the court of Charles II, a young woman must decide what she is willing to risk to reveal the whereabouts of the missing princes.

Website: www.elizabethjstjohn.com

Amazon Author Page: 

https://geni.us/AmazonElizabethStJohn

Lucy St.John, a highborn orphan at King James’s glittering court, is drawn into a dangerous affair with the Earl of Suffolk—a choice that earns powerful enemies.

https://geni.us/MyBookLOTT

e-book & paperback from Amazon

 https://mybook.to/COURAGE-Anthology

or order from any good bookstore

more great anthologies

featuring various authors

https://viewauthor.at/HelenHollick 

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> Next spotlight tomorrow: Antoine Vanner

You might also like books written by 

Helen Hollick 

cosy mystery series

nautical supernatural adventure 

historical fiction:

King Arthur / 1066 era

non-fiction:

Ghost Encounters

Pirates /smugglers

Amazon Author Page: 

https://viewauthor.at/HelenHollick 

or website: 

https://blog.helenhollick.net/

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