Loretta's latest is a pre-Raphaelite love story

3:50pm Friday 5th February 2010 Malvern and Ledbury Gazette

MALVERN author Loretta Proctor publishes her second novel next month.

The Crimson Bed is a Victorian love story and is packed with Loretta’s own passions and interests, including painting and the Pre-Raphelite movement.

Her debut novel, The Long Shadow, which was published five years ago, spent almost 30 years languishing in a cupboard at Loretta’s home in Pickersleigh Road before she finally finished it and sent it to a publisher.

She said: “This one only took me about a year to write but I’d had been working on the ideas for quite a few years.”

(Photo by Carsten Evans)

The cover of The Crimson Bed features a beautiful Pre-Raphelite painting, a particular favourite of Loretta’s, by the artist John Waterhouse.

She said: “I really wanted this painting as the cover. It’s very beautiful and it’s intriguing because there is a skull on the picture that had been painted over but which was revealed by restorers.”

As a member of the Pre-Raphelite Society, Loretta enjoyed researching the background for the novel, making trips to the Bodleian Library and Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

 

The Crimson Bed is published on March 1 by Troubador Publishing, priced £7.99.