Appealing historical fiction

The latest edition of Solander, published by the Historical Novel Society, has an article by US literary agent Irene Goodman on how to write commercially appealing historical fiction. You don't have to be a member to read the article. Here's a quotation from it:

What is “high concept?” It means something that is instantly recognizable and appealing in a short phrase or sentence. “A village in 17th-century England that got the plague and decided to quarantine itself” accurately describes the novel A Year of Wonders (Geraldine Brooks), and it’s all we need to know. “A banker survives the San Francisco earthquake and builds a new life” is not as powerful or as interesting. Why? England works better than San Francisco. Bankers are boring. Villagers are homey and appealing. The plague captures our imaginations more than the earthquake. There is also a great level of suspense with the plague book, because we know that plague killed off two thirds of a population before mysteriously stopping. So we know we will be presented with a cast of characters and that two thirds of them are going to die – but which ones?

Another factor in success with historical fiction is that the majority of the readers are women, and they like to read about other women. Much of history is dominated by men, which means you have to look for subjects that include women. The most common device is to take a woman who really lived and to let her tell her own story, free from the alleged “misrepresentation” of history

- Solander: The Magazine of the Historical Novel Society, v.9 no.2 (Nov. 2005): 15.

I've been puzzling over this article for a while as its purpose isn't entirely clear to me. So far I've thought of three possibilities:
1) Is it tongue-in-cheek, like the Solander Official Rules for Writing Historical Fiction, and I haven't got the joke?
2) Is it the author's personal preferences? She likes books about plague in English villages more than she likes books about bankers surviving earthquakes in San Francisco?
3) Is it intended as a serious analysis of the factors that determine the saleability of historical fiction?

The tone of the article seems most consistent with (3) as the intention. In which case, I'd be interested to know what evidence it is based on. Is it derived from market research results? If so, in which country or countries, and what was the sample, and how was the research conducted? I hope it's based on solid research evidence, because the assertions don't reflect any of the factors that make me buy and read historical fiction. Yes, I know I'm only a sample of one, but I do read a lot of historical fiction and that makes me part of the target market. I'm curious as to how (un)representative a part.

Let's take the statements in turn.

"England works better than San Francisco". Why? Is this a US perspective that sees England as foreign and exotic? Is there something I don't know about San Francisco that makes it an inherently dull place?

"Bankers are boring." Why? (Except in cliche).

"Villagers are homey and appealing." Why? (Except in cliche).

"The plague captures our imaginations more than the earthquake." Why? Both are natural disasters, not human actions, so the interesting thing for me is how people reacted to them and coped with the disruption to their lives. Why is an infectious epidemic automatically more interesting than an earthquake?

"There is also a great level of suspense with the plague book, because we know that plague killed off two thirds of a population before mysteriously stopping. So we know we will be presented with a cast of characters and that two thirds of them are going to die – but which ones?" The book she's discussing is about the plague of 1665/1666 and the village is Eyam in Derbyshire. I wonder whether the 'suspense' is as obvious as stated. The story is well known and has developed considerably in the telling, as discussed in a scholarly paper by Patrick Wallis of the London School of Economics. Incidentally, the received version of the Eyam story is 75-80% mortality, not two-thirds, and the overall mortality rate across the country was very much less - about 19% in London, for example. Assuming the characters in the book are the real people from the records, a well-informed reader may know from the first page who lives and who dies in the end. The parish record from Eyam is extant, and the village has been the subject of several non-fiction books. My knowledge of Eyam is limited to having passed through it on a walk once and wondered idly why there were so many tourists there, and to having watched a TV documentary on genetic immunity that used Eyam as an example. But even I know that the rector survived and his wife Catherine died. Suspense? And even if the characters in the book are all fictional, why exactly is a book automatically attractive because two-thirds of the people in it are going to die a horrible death before the end? If I were looking for that as the main element of a story, I could get it from horror.

"....the majority of the readers are women, and they like to read about other women." This astonishingly sweeping statement makes me hope the article is a spoof. Why lump all women readers together? Don't we have individual tastes? I personally want to read about people and their interactions with each other and with their society. Unless the story is set in a closed community of nuns or a company of celibate warrior-monks, it's likely to include both men and women. I expect the author to make them all individuals, with different points of view, different expectations, different pressures on them and different courses of action open to them. I read historical fiction to explore why decisions were taken as they were, why events fell out as they did, and to get a feeling for how the world worked in a different time and place. Why should I want that filtered through a single-sex perspective or, worse, twisted to fit modern ideas of gender politics? (For a superb example of the stereotypes that can result, see How to Write Feministly-Reimagined Historical Novels). All I ask of an author is that they do some research, try to understand the mindset of an earlier age, and tell an interesting story about it. Surely that's not too much to ask?

So, let's do some highly unscientific market research on a random sample of however many people choose to leave a comment (if there's anyone out there who reads but doesn't comment, please de-lurk).

Do you read historical fiction?
What attracts you to a novel?
What repels you?
And why?