By Stephanie Churchill Ling

I remember standing in that room, shelves and shelves of books surrounding me, feeling like I was inside a highly curated private library. The truth is that I actually was in a highly curated private library. It just happened to belong to a dear friend and one of the most beloved historical fiction authors of the modern era. After so many visits, the smell of books, the rows and rows of research and notebooks, the bins of pamphlets, was so familiar to me. Now I faced the task of reconciling memories of a successful author with my memories of the sweet, unassuming woman who had collected it all.

“What are we going to do with all this stuff?” I asked Mary Glassman, who stood on the other side of the room with another armful of books she had just brought down from the upstairs office.

She didn’t even have to reply. Her face mirrored the same feelings of determined resignation as mine.

It was March 2021, and our dear friend, Sharon Kay Penman, had passed away only a handful of months previously. Lost in a sea of grief, and uncertain what to do with the houseful of files, papers, books, and binders, Sharon’s family reached out to me, asking for my help. Not only was I a close friend of Sharon’s, but I was also an author with some connections to her publishing world. They hoped I could use my connections and knowledge to help them sort through a lifetime’s literary estate.

The day before, I had arrived at the Philadelphia airport from Minneapolis. Mary picked me up, and we began the hour long drive to Sharon’s home in Mays Landing, NJ. We both felt a mix of emotions, knowing the task ahead, realizing we needed to set aside our sorrow and get down to business. It would take a well-executed plan to accomplish the huge project ahead of us.

Like me, Mary was a long-time fan of Sharon’s. She had met Sharon initially in the summer of 2011 when she participated in the In the Footsteps of Eleanor of Aquitaine Tour, spending around ten days visiting Paris, Poitiers, and other sites closely associated with Eleanor’s life and times. After their connection on the tour, they shared hundreds of emails, and every summer, Mary traveled the short distance to Sharon’s home for a special lunch. One of the multitude of things they often discussed was how to go about cleaning out Sharon’s garage.

The idea of cleaning out Sharon’s garage was something Sharon and I talked about often enough as well, and as Mary and I drove together to May’s Landing to do just that, the whole idea felt smothered in poignancy. This was not how we had ever envisioned accomplishing the task.

It was only when we arrived at her house on Essex Street that the enormity of what lay ahead truly hit. I had visited Sharon many times, but now, seeing the house upturned and unpacked, the job seemed to loom larger than it had just an hour before.

“We’ve begun to sort through her personal things,” Nancylee, Sharon’s sister-in-law, told us. “Billy,” Nancylee’s son and Sharon’s nephew, “has been living here to help, and we’ve gone through a lot already.”

Mary and I stood just inside the front door, surveying the piles in the living room all around us. To our right, and through the doorway to the den, lay the most significant part of our work: bookshelves lining the walls as they had always done. On top of the bookshelves sat plastic bins of papers, pamphlets, and other research material from a lifetime of traveling to England, Wales, and France.

Over the course of the next several days, we sorted and moved thousands of books, repacked reams of files and papers and binders—notes, research, book drafts, and correspondence.

But to ask, “What are we going to do with all of this?” is a bit misleading. For the weeks prior to our arrival, we had already begun to contact institutional libraries and public libraries, seeking donation recipients. We understood that Sharon had spent hours upon hours tracking down some of the items in her collection. We knew she had paid several hundred dollars, in some instances, for a single book she needed for research (often to verify a single fact). We were not about to let those books go into a dumpster!

In the following weeks, visitors from the Rutgers Law Library (Sharon’s former alma mater), would arrive to peruse and make selections. A curator from the Penn Libraries at the University of Pennsylvania would do the same. The job only required us to combine all the books from two levels of her house in one place, organized by topic, to make the librarians’ jobs easier.

Okay, so that was the books sorted.

But what about all the papers, files, manuscript drafts, and research?
Did I mention we were surrounded by piles? Piles and piles? We had discovered papers in closets, papers in drawers, papers in the garage, in bins, in buckets, in the laundry room. Sharon kept nearly all the correspondence she had ever received from fans. Paper hid in every nook and cranny in her house. The guest room bedside table? Yep. Even there.

“It’s a shame I don’t live here so I could devote months to cataloging and recording everything,” I sighed as Mary and I sat companionably in Sharon’s living room one evening. “We could almost turn her house into its own research library. What a treasure trove for a person who might want to write a biography about her.”

But we both knew there were dreams, and there was reality. It would take funding to accomplish such a task, and the Penman family needed to act quickly to empty the house and get it on the market. Time was not our friend, and there simply was not a wealthy philanthropist waiting to swoop in and fund a private research library. We needed to prioritize and save what we could.
And in that, we were not without help.

Waiting in the wings to take on the enormous task of preserving Sharon’s writing heritage, if not her fan’s correspondence, were two organizations: The Richard III Society, and Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru—the National Library of Wales.

Matthew Lewis, the newly elected Chair of the Richard III Society—a historian and author in his own right and with whom I had previously corresponded in various writing and history circles—agreed to take on the task of accepting the donation of all materials related to The Sunne in Splendour, along with the rest of the Plantagenet series. It was an arrangement we imagined Sharon would have personally approved of. It was only necessary for us to group all the material together, package it into plastic bins, and await Matthew’s work on the mammoth task of arranging transportation to the other side of the pond. Thanks to Susan Troxell of the American branch who was the “boots on the ground” to pick it all up and prepare it for it’s ultimate journey.

That left all the research, notes, marketing, correspondence, and drafts of the Welsh books.

Enter Rob Phillips, Head of Archives and Manuscripts Section and the Welsh Political Archive, Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru (The National Library of Wales) in Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, Wales. The Welsh Political Archive exists to collect, store, catalogue and promote archival material which reflects the political life of Wales. While Here Be Dragons is a work of historical fiction, the series portrays events that happened during some of the most dramatic and heartbreaking periods of Welsh history.

Special thanks go to Mary’s husband, Edward Jones. A Welshman and local who had his own connections with the library, Edward connected us with Rob in the first place, and we would not have been able to navigate the path without him!

With the blessing of the Penman family, Rob began to work on the months-long process of preparing all the necessary legal and tax documentation for the donation. Then, some time in the summer of 2021, Mary sent the materials from her home, directly into the hands of Rob and staff at the library. Mary and Edward were able to visit the library later on, meeting with Rob in person.

We had found homes for the most important pieces of Sharon’s literary legacy. But the actions were not without mixed emotions. How strange to sort through decades’ worth of a person’s life’s work. Reams of correspondence between Sharon and her long-time agent Molly Friedrich, and her editor Marian Wood revealed gems of history. The feelings it induced to find marked-up drafts of her very first book, The Sunne in Splendour, and to read Sharon’s personal journal documenting her struggles and worries over her inadequacies as a writer! It seems strange to think that such a literary giant could ever have doubts about her own abilities, but it only takes remembering a piece of advice she gave me years ago to remind me that it isn’t so odd. “Always be suspicious of any writer who thinks they have it all figured out.”

I trust you, Sharon. Afterall, I was the one to teach you to write a text, and to your last day you were convinced you didn’t have it figured out.

Sharon’s house has since been sold. The room, which was once filled to the brim with books about the native flowers of Israel, rare biographies of various medieval noblemen, and farming practices of medieval France now belongs to another.

Though Sharon is no longer with us, fans will always have her more than a dozen works of art in the form of historical novels as a way to remember her. The Penn Libraries and Rutgers University Libraries now have a larger research collection by way of Sharon’s own personal library. The Richard III Society will preserve the collection related to the Plantagenets, and Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru in Aberystwyth will preserve a beloved piece of its own Welsh history.

What will we do with all this stuff? We will pass along a heritage, and we are all richer for it.

In coming installments of this blog, I will update you on the status of the donated collections.