I've known the title of one of her books for ages (Hawk of May), but never bothered to read them; having lucked into a Great Rebellion/rogue printer novel a while ago, I picked up her The Sand-Reckoner, about Archimedes' early career, and am now reading them all fast as I can.
The characters generally start the book four-fifths defeated. I don't know that any of the beginnings are as thumping as waking up with no memory in the crater of a volcano about to explode (a bombast that I can't remember the title of), but I think waking up badly wounded on your own pyre, with the enemy soldiers not noticing you only because they've gone into the shade to escape the killing heat of the desert at noon, is plenty enough trouble to start with (Cleopatra's Heir).
Bradshaw's characters are also not quite wish-fulfilment characters; they are mostly smart and reasonably likable, but not effortlessly smart or given unreasonably devoted followers and enemies (as in too many of 's novels). Most of them get out of trouble by paying a lot of attention to the people around them (Render Unto Caesar, an excellent trader's noir set in early Imperial Rome; or Island of Ghosts, about a princely defeated Sarmatian exiled to be his Roman conquerors' shock troops in northern Britain). Some survive by concentrating on a singular gift and letting other people react to them (Dangerous Notes, like and unlike The Gold Bug Variations; or The Wolf Hunt, which retells a lai of ). Some of the problems so far have been moral quandaries, but the point of the novels has not been to mull and marinate, but to choose a path and carry it out competently.
The prose is clear; the historical characters are probably more fitted to modern mores than they should be (uneasy about slavery, accepting female agency); and they wind up with a few pages on which parts are better or worse documented in actual history. Most of the stories are romances in the modern sense, with autonomy and skill valued in both partners. They're as good as a basket of apples.
Find in a Library: books by Gillian Bradshaw.
So wrote clew in Fiction (20th c.).