Keira Morgan

Keira Morgan is a Canadian-Mexican historical novelist whose work concentrates on the women of late-medieval and Renaissance France. She studied Renaissance and Reformation history at university through doctoral level before deciding against an academic career, later working in the Canadian public service as a training designer and manager. Throughout that career she continued researching and writing historical fiction, eventually settling in Mexico and becoming a full-time writer. Morgan is particularly interested in royal and noble women whose political importance has often been overshadowed by the men around them, and her fiction is built closely around documented events, court politics, marriage alliances and the restrictions placed upon female inheritance and power.

Her principal historical sequence is the Chronicles of the House of Valois, centred on Anne of Brittany, her daughters Claude and Renée, Louise of Savoy and the emergence of Francis I’s court. The Importance of Wives begins in 1488 when the eleven-year-old Anne inherits Brittany and struggles against French expansion and noblemen seeking to control her through marriage. The Importance of Pawns moves forward to Anne’s final years and the struggle over the futures of her daughters, particularly Claude’s marriage to the future Francis I and the fate of Brittany. The Importance of Sons continues into Francis I’s reign, with Claude, Louise of Savoy and other women manoeuvring within a court where dynastic survival depends heavily upon producing male heirs. Together the novels cover the transition from independent Brittany into Renaissance France, with particular emphasis on Anne of Brittany, the Valois monarchy, dynastic marriage and women exercising political influence within a system designed largely to exclude them.