Edith Pargeter

Edith Pargeter was a prolific British author best remembered under her pen name Ellis Peters for the Brother Cadfael historical mysteries, but she wrote extensively and for decades under her own name too, producing well-regarded historical fiction that stands apart from her mystery work. Her most celebrated work under the Pargeter name is The Heaven Tree Trilogy, a tragic multi-generational story of a stonemason's family on the Welsh Marches in the thirteenth century, followed by The Brothers of Gwynedd, a four-volume dramatization of the real historical struggle of the Welsh princes of Gwynedd against the English crown, narrated by a fictional clerk in Prince Llywelyn's household.

Pargeter's interest in Welsh history, medieval life and the border country between England and Wales runs through both her Ellis Peters mysteries and her Edith Pargeter historical fiction, though the two bodies of work share no characters or continuity. She was awarded an OBE in 1994 for services to literature and was a founding figure in bringing serious historical research to genre fiction, whether writing mysteries or straight historical novels. New readers curious about her non-mystery work should start with The Heaven Tree, the first volume of her best-known trilogy.