In the wake of World War I, on a remote island off the coast of Australia, lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne and his wife Isabel make a life-altering choice: to keep and raise a foundling child who is not theirs. The repercussions of this decision shape M.L. Stedman’s stunning debut novel, The Light Between Oceans.

We caught up with Stedman (herself born and raised in Western Australia) for a discussion of right and wrong, moral ambiguity and an author’s responsibility to her characters.

What a mesmerizing story. Did anything specific inspire you to write The Light Between Oceans?
I write fairly instinctively, just seeing what comes up when I sit down at the page. For this story, it was a lighthouse, then a woman and a man. Before long, a boat washed up on the beach, and in it I could see a dead man, and then a crying baby. Everything that happens in the book stems from this initiating image—a bit like the idea of ‘Big Bang’—an initial point that seems tiny turns out to be incredibly dense, and just expanded outward further and further. I got to know Tom and Isabel as I wrote them, and was drawn into their seemingly insoluble dilemma, and their struggle to stay true to their love for each other as well as to their own deepest drives.

The major moral question of keeping a child that isn’t yours is posed early in the book. Do you think there was a “right” decision for Tom and Isabel?
Aha! It’s up to each reader to come up with their own answer to this one.

Fair enough. Well, you do a wonderful job of refusing to pass judgment on your characters. Was this a conscious choice and if so, was it difficult to do?
It was a conscious choice, yes. I think today more than ever we can fall into “sound-bite judgment,” reaching conclusions on the basis of quite a cursory consideration of an issue. It’s a kind of moral multitasking, that stems perhaps from being required to have an opinion on everything. If we really stop to consider things, they’re rarely black and white.

As to the second part of your question, the more my own views differed from that of a character, the more satisfying I found it to explore them and to put their point of view as convincingly as possible.

To this end, do you think there is a “bad guy” here? Do all books need heroes and antagonists?
I don’t think there are any “bad guys” in the book, just some poor choices made on the basis of imperfect information or perspective (i.e. the lot of the standard-issue human). Stories need tension, which can be supplied by antagonists, but here it’s supplied by fate or circumstance—the overwhelming force that pretty much all the characters are up against. One good character’s gain will be another good character’s loss, which makes the questions a lot harder. I didn’t want there to be any “safe place” in the book where the reader could relax and say, “I’m completely sure of what the right thing to do is here.”

If we really stop to consider things, they’re rarely black and white.

Speaking of antagonists, the landscape of Janus Rock and the great sea beyond is awfully unforgiving. Is it based on a real location?
No and yes. The island of Janus Rock is entirely fictitious (although I have a placeholder for it on Google maps). But the region where the Great Southern Ocean and the Indian Ocean meet is real, and the climate, weather and the landscape are more or less as I’ve described them. I wrote some of the book there: It’s a very beautiful, if sometimes fierce, part of the world.

Lighthouses are always weighty images in literature. What do they represent to you?
A lighthouse automatically implies potential drama: You only find them where there’s a risk of going astray or running aground. They’re a reminder, too, of human frailty, and the heroic endeavor of mankind to take on the forces of nature in a ludicrously unfair fight to make safe our journey through this world. And they betoken binary opposites such as safety and danger, light and dark, movement and stasis, communication and isolation—they are intrinsically dynamic because they make our imaginations pivot between them.

What kind of research did you do to prepare to write?
To prepare, none at all! My research very much followed the story rather than leading it. I climbed up lighthouses, and went through the lightkeepers’ logbooks in the Australian National Archives—wonderful. And I spent time in the British Library, reading battalion journals and other materials from Australian soldiers in WWI: heartbreaking accounts that often left me in tears.

Do you have any useful tips for aspiring novelists?
Write because you love it. Write because that’s how you want to spend those irreplaceable heartbeats. Don’t write to please anyone else, or to achieve something that will retrospectively validate your choice.

Two of the 19th century’s most notable minds meet in poet Enid Shomer’s debut novel, The Twelve Rooms of the Nile.

With a novel like this, you know there was a historical fact that provided the initial spark to your imagination. What was it?
The initial spark was learning that Flaubert and Nightingale traveled the Nile at the same time. I’m not talking about approximately the same time. They were towed from Cairo to the navigable part of the river through the Mahmoudieh Canal on the same boat. That day, Flaubert wrote a description in his journal of a woman in a “hideous green eyeshade,” and we know that Nightingale had such a contraption that she wore attached to her bonnet. Their itineraries throughout their Nile journeys were almost identical. It’s kind of a miracle that they didn’t meet!

Did you know a lot about Florence Nightingale and Flaubert before you started the novel? Do you think readers need to know about them before they read the novel?
I did not know a lot. My sense of Nightingale at the outset was based on Lytton Strachey’s book Eminent Victorians, which depicts Nightingale as a shrewish and eccentric control freak. (He claims she actually worked one of her friends to death.) The more I read about and by her, the more I came to reject this depiction. She was, for one thing, blessed with a fabulous wit, a virtue Strachey ignored completely. Other early biographers painted her in saintly sepia tones. I set out to find out who the real Nightingale was.

I knew that Flaubert was an important writer and I’d read many of his books, but I was unfamiliar with his life. His journals and letters were a revelation to me. And he, too, had a magnificent sense of humor.

Readers don’t need to know anything about either character before encountering them in my novel. For one thing, in 1850 they both were unknown, confused and upset about their futures, so any notion the reader may have of who they are doesn’t apply. They hadn’t yet done the deeds that would inscribe them into canonical history. She was 29; he was 28. They considered themselves failures. Part of the pleasure of the novel for the reader is taking the journey to self-discovery with them.

It’s hard to imagine Flaubert and Nightingale together, yet there are so many similarities regarding what stage they were in their lives. Did that surprise you?
Despite the obvious differences between Nightingale and Flaubert, I always intuited that they had something essential in common, and my faith in that connection was one of the driving forces behind the book.

Certainly on the surface the dissimilarities were huge, and not just to me. One scholar of the period I consulted told me that these two lived in different lobes of her brain despite being contemporaries, and that she had never thought of them in the same breath. Of course, it turned out that they had a tremendous number of things in common, for they shared the same general culture and came from similar social classes. They both rebelled against upper-middle-class European values, and perhaps most importantly, they were both geniuses.

You based the character of Trout, Nightingale’s maid, on the real life writings of a different 19th-century servant. Why did you do that and what do you think she adds to the novel?
As part of my research, I delved into the lives of Victorian servants. Also, the real-life Trout had disappeared into the vast bone-pile of history, so I had to make her up from scratch. The only clue I had was that she and Flo didn’t always get along, that there was friction in their relationship. Reading the historical servant’s journals helped me to shape a vocabulary and a love life for the fictional Trout.

To me, Trout is an especially endearing and important character. First of all, she is amusing as well as wise in her own way. We get to read parts of her journal and thus get another view of things, one that is often at odds with Nightingale’s. The class differences between them provide insights into Nightingale’s limitations as a would-be humanitarian and social thinker. Trout forces Nightingale to grow—by example and also by challenging her assumptions. 

This is not your first foray into the life of historical person—I am thinking of your poem cycle about the first woman pilot to break the sound barrier, Jacqueline Cochran. Can you talk about the challenges of exploring a famous person’s life in prose versus poetry?
I began my writing career as a poet, but soon turned to writing short stories, and eventually, the novel. Though I wrote the Cochran poem-biography (Stars at Noon) in an attempt to deal with character through poetry, I believe that except for epic or book-length poems, poetry is not well-suited to exploring character, especially as it evolves over time. For me, poetry is primarily about language and metaphor, while fiction, though it, too, requires powerful language and metaphor, is essentially about time.

What did you discover about this time period or any of the characters that you couldn’t or chose not to add to the novel?
I learned a lot of surprising things about the period and my characters. For example, in the late Victorian Age, nearly one in four persons in England was a servant. There were juicy bits, too. Richard Monckton Milnes, the first biographer of Keats and the man Nightingale refused to marry, amassed the largest collection of pornography in England. (It is now housed in the British Library). He was also part of a group of prominent Victorian men who wrote pornography together as a hobby. They composed it round-robin style, and published under pseudonyms, always attributing their books to publishers in exotic locales—Constantinople, Cairo or Aleppo in Syria. Nightingale would not, I venture, have approved. I think she was right to refuse to marry Milnes. She would have been much better off with someone like Flaubert.

Have you been to Egypt and if not, did writing this make you want to visit?
I have never visited Egypt, though I have lived in two countries in the Middle East. Egypt is currently at the top of my travel list. I especially want to travel down the Nile.

What’s next for you?
I am currently working on a project that involves two stories: a contemporary one set in the early 1990s, and an historical one set in 1599. I love doing research, which, after all, is just focused reading and travel.

RELATED CONTENT
Read a review of The Twelve Rooms of the Nile.

In her debut novel, The Stockholm Octavo, Karen Engelmann creates not only a convincing world and memorable characters, but a fate-changing card game. Mrs. Sparrow, the proprietress of one of Stockholm's most exclusive gaming salons, lays the Octavo for only the most special of customers—until her sixth sense informs her that a humble customs official, Emil, might play a pivotal role in the kingdom's fate. We asked Engelmann a few questions about cards, writing and the number eight.

The Stockholm Octavo is a puzzle novel, the kind of satisfying mystery where a reader can really revel in putting the pieces together page by page. What is it like to write this type of novel? Did its structure come first, or the story?
I let the novel reveal itself over a long period, which was both a puzzle and a mystery for me! Eighteenth-century Stockholm, folding fans, the assassination of Gustav III and the number 8 served as inspiration and main components. The real writing started with the fictional characters (backstory, personal details, a pivotal event in their life), most of which did not make it into the novel. The storyline emerged from these characters inserting themselves into history, and the structure came last. Everything changed dramatically during the various revisions, and keeping track of the details made me (and the editing team) crazy at times. With patience, hard work and a ream of sticky notes, it eventually came together. 

You have a degree in the visual arts, and have worked as a book designer. How involved were you with the physical design of the book—and the cards that make up the Octavo?
My only part was to create the Octavo diagrams and the timeline for the front matter. I was consulted, of course, by the Ecco design team, who created the splendid design for the U.S. edition, which I absolutely LOVE. The Octavo cards are a 16th-century German deck that I discovered doing research on gaming. They fit Mrs. Sparrow’s philosophy perfectly, and the drawings (by Jost Amman) speak volumes about human nature. I wish that I had drawn them!

Have you actually laid an Octavo for anyone? Do you believe in divination?
I have not laid the Octavo and would decline if asked; reading cards (like any other skill) requires a special interest and ability, and takes years of study and practice (I have the interest but none of the rest.) As for divination, I do believe there are people with intuitive abilities who can sense and decipher energies that others cannot—but there are very few of them out there. To me, this is not dissimilar from people who compose, sing, do higher mathematics, or anything else at an advanced, professional level. It takes tremendous talent and rigorous training. 

This novel explores many of the myths and legends that surround the number eight. Has this always been a significant number for you?
Absolutely! I was born on the 8th, into a family of eight children. I have carried a brass key ring stamped with an eight since college. I was told by a numerologist that my soul’s urge was eight, and it’s a beautiful number besides so it appeals to my design sensibilities. It symbolizes good fortune in China, but is rather ignored in Western culture. Maybe that’s about to change.

The French Revolution had an amazing ripple affect across Western Europe, and arguably did as much for other countries as it did in France. Do you think revolutions can be contained?
I am not a historian or scholar, but my response would be that revolutions spread—sometimes the ideas and intent rather than physical acts of rebellion. These revolutionary ideas can inspire likeminded action (with or without the upheaval and violence) or cause a reactionary backlash. That’s happening right now in the Middle East, isn’t it?

What did you learn about 18th-century Stockholm that surprised you?
Despite the geographical isolation, late 18th-century Stockholm was an incredibly lively and diverse city, full of culture, beauty, drama and fascinating characters. It’s not what one imagines when the topic of Swedish history comes up in conversation.

What are you working on next?
In an attempt to pull myself out of the shadows of the 18th century, I am working on a novel much lighter in tone, set in a more recent century (20th). This book also focuses on cards—but greeting cards this time. I am very interested in the juncture of art and commerce, and also the combination of text and image in books (although it’s not a graphic novel). The work (so far) has been gleeful, but is far from finished. Thanks for asking!

RELATED CONTENT
Read a review of The Stockholm Octavo.

Tara Conklin didn’t always think of herself as a novelist. Sure, as a kid she always kept a journal and was, as she puts it, “scribbling stories.” And as a corporate attorney living in New York City, she loved her job in part because it included so much writing. But she wasn’t a writer.

“I was still writing just as a hobby,” she says. “It was my dirty little secret—I was a closet writer.”

Conklin spoke with BookPage from her home in Seattle. On the day we spoke, she was busily packing her young family for a trip to London, where her husband is from. Even so, the gracious Conklin spoke passionately about The House Girl, the luminous debut novel she has been writing on and off for several years.

After she started early drafts of the book, Conklin wasn’t quite sure what would become of it.

“I didn’t think I was writing a novel,” she says. “It was just another story but it kept getting longer and longer. There were many times I set it aside. I had two young kids. I didn’t have time to be spending on this pie-in-the-sky dream of writing a novel.”

But she couldn’t get Josephine Bell out of her head—she even had dreams about the character. A teenage house slave on a Virginia tobacco farm, Josephine dreams of freedom and plots an escape to Philadelphia, away from the cruel master who permanently hobbled one slave who tried to run away by slicing his heels.

The House Girl intertwines Josephine’s story with that of Lina Sparrow, a modern-day attorney who is helping with a lawsuit seeking reparations for slavery. Her work leads her to Josephine, who may have been the real artist behind paintings attributed to her mistress.

Conklin's novel toggles between centuries and characters who are searching for love and meaning in their lives.

As Lina dives deeper into her research, she struggles not only to find out what happened to Josephine but also to convey the breadth of slavery’s intergenerational impact—the “nature of the harm,” in lawyer-speak. And Lina has some mysteries in her own past she needs to confront, too, like what happened when her mother disappeared so many years ago.

Conklin played with the story for several years, but it was only after she quit her job in Big Law and moved to Seattle that she decided to commit to being a writer.

“I was sort of done with big cities, and we wanted to think of a good place to live with kids and where I could write,” she says. “It was definitely touch and go for awhile. People thought we were crazy.”

As she got deeper into The House Girl, it wasn’t lost on Conklin that another young white woman—Kathryn Stockett—was getting some pretty significant pushback for writing about black women in 1960s Mississippi in The Help. That was part of the reason Conklin chose to write in the third person and not try to accurately capture the diction of a 19th-century slave.

“When I was writing this, first of all, I never thought anyone would read it. I was just interested in the person,” she says. “Josephine is a character with universal human experience—she is someone who wanted all the same things we all want: freedom and love and meaning in her life.”

At this point, Conklin loses her train of thought and can’t pluck the word she wants off the tip of her tongue.

“Can you tell my baby is teething and I didn’t get much sleep last night?” she laughs.

Though Conklin concedes that writing while parenting can be a challenge, “It’s one of the few careers that really lends itself well to being a parent. It’s not like you have to be in an office. I’m very unprecious about my writing time and space. I can pull the laptop out and write for 20 minutes while the kids play. I can write in a moving car. We have a very strict bedtime of 8 p.m. and then I sit down and write everything I thought about that day.”

The House Girl is the rare novel that seamlessly toggles between centuries and characters and remains consistently gripping throughout. It would appear that thoroughly modern Lina—self-sufficient, unattached—is everything the women in her research are not. But Lina feels a kinship when she reads a letter from a Virginia woman whose family helped slaves escape and run north, a woman who has realized she only wants a simple life full of love and kindness.

“Lina closed the biography. For a moment, Dorothea was present with her in the office, layered in skirts and petticoats, with her convictions and resolve, talking to Lina. Is it too much to wish for such a life? Is it too little? Lina laughed with tears in her eyes because the words written 150 years ago by a young woman she would never meet seemed truer than anything she’d read in her textbooks, anything she’d been told by her law professors. . . .”

Conklin’s debut novel is a quiet book; she never sends Lina breathlessly chasing down leads, and Josephine suffers her heartbreak not with The Color Purple-esque monologues but with unending dignity. But it is that very quietness that makes The House Girl so powerful.

In Joyce Carol Oates’ chilling new novel The Accursed, a curse has befallen the small town of Princeton, New Jersey, where a young bride-to-be has mysteriously disappeared before her wedding and a stranger who just might be the devil has come to town. In a Q&A with BookPage, Oates talks about the research process and her experience with writing historical figures.

The Accursed is billed as a “history” and includes many asides and jumps in time. What made you choose this unusual form and what do you think the story gains by the choice?

The novel is one of several "postModernist gothic" novels I have written—Bellefleur, A Bloodsmoor Romance, Mysteries of Winterthurn, My Heart Laid Bare. It is an epic of a sort, requiring space, time, depth, meditation and analysis.?

You began this book in 1984 and then abandoned it for other projects. What made you pick the manuscript up again?

I'd begun revising a manuscript titled The Crosswicks Horror several times, but was not satisfied with the authorial voice. Every few years I would rewrite more pages, then turn to other projects. But last year, an idea came to me of how to proceed, and I rewrote the novel quickly, in a "white-hot" siege of inspiration. Revising/rewriting is the writer's happiest time—first drafts are the difficult.??

The book takes place in Princeton, where you’ve lived and worked for years. What were the challenges and benefits of writing about a setting you know so intimately? Did you uncover anything about Princeton's history that surprised you?

Much research into local history and into the history of Woodrow Wilson's presidency at the University were required, of course. Some of the books I've listed in the Acknowledgments, but there were many more into which I glimpsed.?

The narrator claims he has perused at least a full ton of research materials to create his history. What kind of research did you do to write the book?

Research in Firestone Library, originally; plus books on Woodrow Wilson which I'd discovered in a second-hand bookshop in Cranberry, New Jersey.?

What sparked the idea for the curse?

My realization that the failure to intercede in racism—the failure to repudiate publicly such racist organizations as the Ku Klux Klan—was the sin of the "good" white Christian community not only in 1905-06 but through the decades. To do nothing, to say nothing, to try nothing—this was nearly as great a crime as willful acts of violence like lynchings.?

Many well-known historical characters show up in the book, including Woodrow Wilson and Grover Cleveland. What are the challenges of including real-life people in fiction? Which of them was the most fun to write about? The most difficult?

It is always challenging to create a character, whether historical or imagined. The most "fun" to write about was Theodore Roosevelt, whose portrait is more or less true to life. Some individuals, like Roosevelt and Jack London, are larger than life, inimitable. There is also a cameo appearance by the man who was the model for Sherlock Holmes, who was enjoyable to bring to life.?

Many of the characters in your book carry deep social prejudices that were common in the time period. How did you manage to write sympathetically about characters whose beliefs would be considered unconscionable today?

I tend not to judge people harshly—I present them, with their flaws and virtues, and allow the reader to make his or her own assessment.?

Is there a message you hope readers will get from this book?

I don't write "message" novels but would hope that the reader comes away from The Accursed with a deeper sense of our American past, and an awareness of the often astonishing interplay between figures we now consider historical and even iconic. Essentially, they are human beings just like us—perhaps, in some cases, more flawed and reprehensible. And the novel's underlying urgency has to do with the evolution of our democracy—the gradual interaction, and integration, of the races—as well as the strengthening of women's rights.?

What are you working on now?

My next novel, Carthage, portrays the situation of an Iraqi war vet returning to his upstate New York town; his difficulties returning to civilian life, and the difficulties his fiancee and family have as a consequence. It is a realistic novel in a way that The Accursed is a surrealist novel, but both are grounded in psychological realism and in American history.

RELATED CONTENT
Read our review of The Accursed.

Popular understanding of Zelda Fitzgerald has her pegged as something between two of F. Scott’s notorious female characters: devastating Rosalind from This Side of Paradise and vacuous Gloria from The Beautiful and Damned. Add a dollop of insanity, and that’s our Zelda. But as Therese Anne Fowler reveals in her new novel, Z, that’s not the whole story.

F. Scott’s legendary wife, as defined by media, literature and time, is less a real woman and more a mythical flapper creature. She is remembered as impulsive, usually drunk and eventually schizophrenic, and together she and Scott ruled the Jazz Age as American royalty. That’s the myth, and when Fowler first considered writing Z, it was all she knew.

“All I thought I knew about her was that she was Scott’s crazy wife,” Fowler says from her home in Raleigh, North Carolina. “I just couldn’t imagine that writing about a crazy person would be very interesting except in a Mommie Dearest sort of way.”

As it turns out, Zelda wasn’t crazy. She was probably misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and more likely suffered from bipolar disorder. Her wild behavior in New York has also been exaggerated over time (though she did jump from a table down a flight of stairs). “She’s made out to be this sort of diva,” says Fowler. “I have included some of those incidents, but I think they do not stand out quite as vividly because I’m offsetting them with day-to-day truths of her life, the struggle.”

That’s the side of Zelda that has been forgotten by history, memorialized only in letters—her diaries cannot be found—and resurrected now in fiction: She was a mother and a wife, grappling with an identity separate from her marriage, split between the Southern sensibilities of her youth and the modern, feminist ideas she encountered in Paris. “Zelda is sort of hamstrung by being raised a traditional Southern girl, and then she lived in this world of rapid women’s rights developments and never seemed to be able to be one or the other of those women,” Fowler explains. “She would’ve been much happier if she’d identified one way or the other.”

This humanized Zelda is markedly less glamorous and therefore less of what we might want her to be. But Fowler maintains that the inexperienced, lost Zelda depicted in Z is much closer to the truth. “I have not taken liberties with the story or characterization in any case, in any character throughout the book,” Fowler says. “[The story] that pop culture has shown [readers] previously is an over-hyped misrepresentation. Zelda will get the fair shake that she didn’t get in her own lifetime.”

Zelda tells the story in her own words, in what could be called a “fictional memoir” that begins with a siren call: “Look closer and you’ll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we have seemed.” From there, Zelda takes readers to her childhood home in Alabama, where she first meets a dashing young F. Scott, and then to New York City, where they decide to act like characters from his first novel to draw the public eye, thus beginning their scandalous reign over NYC.

It is not until they move to Europe that the label of “wife” starts to conflict with Zelda’s own aspirations, but when she seeks careers in dance, art and writing, Scott’s jealousy creeps in. Throughout her life, Zelda’s identity is inextricably aligned with Scott’s career—Scott defined the Jazz Age as a whole, and Zelda’s identity in particular, and she could never disconnect from that. This is her great tragedy.

Juicy scenes, such as boozy stunts and rumors of an affair between Scott and Hemingway, add spice to a relatively simple story of a disintegrating marriage. Perhaps the only scene in which Fowler takes fiction’s liberties is when Hemingway propositions Zelda.

“[That scene is] deductive based on everything that I could find about their relationship,” says Fowler, who could find no historic evidence as to why Zelda and Hemingway never got along. “I wasn’t ramping it up, so to speak, for the purpose of story. I thought, ‘This is just something this guy does.’ ”

Z introduces an arguably more flattering Zelda, but Scott loses his golden-boy veneer (as Hemingway does in Paula McLain’s novel, The Paris Wife). At his worst, he is an obtuse bully and an insecure fool. “We have these preconceived ideas of him partially based on anecdotal stuff . . . and also [from] reading his work,” explains Fowler, who filtered Scott’s worst out of the book. “We see this thoughtful, compassionate, tender person behind the story. Nobody who writes the kinds of things he wrote could be otherwise, but the truth of it is, he was a man of the times and he did have some struggles.”

While Fowler blames neither Scott nor Zelda for the ruin of their marriage, she has found that readers often take sides, and she expects criticism from “Team Scott.”

“For me to tell this story and to give it the verisimilitude that it deserved, if I wanted to stand up against the critical eye that’s going to be brought to it, I couldn’t make it a polemic in the way biographers seem to get away with,” Fowler says. “I didn’t think that would be fair to either of them.”

No matter which side they’re on, readers will find Z to be an intimate look at the collapse of a fascinating celebrity marriage through the eyes of a woman who defies expectations. “Her voice, her letters, her essays and her short fiction were all so clear and accessible and humorous and wry,” Fowler says. “She wasn’t out there trying to be anyone’s hero except maybe her own, and not doing such a great job at that, either. I think she fought the good fight in the end. I think that’s one of the reasons I admire her.”

Philipp Meyer's second novel, The Son, is one of the most anticipated literary releases of the year. A true epic that encompasses generations and traces 200 years of Texas history, it challenges our own creation myths and explores the costs of survival. We asked Meyer a few questions about the book and how far he'd gone in the name of research. 

To reduce it to its most basic, The Son is a creation story—the creation of a family dynasty, a state and even a country, since as Jeanne argues, America would not be what it is without Texas oil. Versus your debut, American Rust, which is the story of an America in decline. How do you see the two books in relation to each other?
When I started writing The Son I wanted to do something that was the opposite of American Rust—I didn’t want to be seen as a guy who only wrote about one class or one group of people or one set of problems. I was interested in the American creation myth, the story that we all believe about how our country (and by extension, ourselves) came to be. The more I read and researched the more I realized that almost everything I’d believed about our creation myth or national narrative or whatever you might call it—was wrong. The John Wayne version we all learn as a child (noble Anglo goes into the wilderness, fights off vicious Indians, etc.) was clearly wrong, but the version I’d learned in college, which I might roughly summarize as: “Europeans all bad, Native Americans all good” was also wrong. The truth is actually much simpler, which is that regardless of their race or cultural background or skin color, people are just people, and they mostly act the same—for better and for worse.

If I didn't trust the book knowledge I would go out and do the real thing. For instance, because the Comanches and other plains tribes depended so heavily on the buffalo, I knew I needed to understand what the inside of a buffalo actually smelled like, what the blood actually tasted like, etc.

You grew up in Baltimore, and now live in Austin, Texas. Was your move what drew you to write about the state's history?
When I was doing an MFA at the Michener Center I took a Texas history class. The more I learned about the state, the more I saw that the history of Texas is like a very compressed version of the history of America as a whole. I did not, and do not, really think of this as a “Texas book.” It’s a book about the way our country was founded and settled.

This is a novel that truly deserves the description "epic." Each of the three main narratives could have been a novel on its own, and Eli's captivity story in particular contains an incredible level of detail about Comanche customs and culture. What sort of research did you do for this book?
In total I read between 250 and 350 books, of which I still have about 250. Of course I interviewed dozens of people as well. And I walked and camped and slept out in most of the places I describe in the book, took careful notes about flora and fauna, read archeological studies about how the flora and fauna have changed over time. I read every single first-hand account of early Texas I could find. From an environmental or natural history standpoint, Texas has changed enormously over the past 150 years, and those early narratives are crucial for figuring out how. One very obvious thing is that back then, nearly the entire state was a grassland. 

I also took several weeks of tracking classes and spent a lot of time in the woods learning how to track and study animals. I taught myself how to hunt with a bow and arrow, killed (and ate) several deer and tanned their hides, helped a rancher with his buffalo harvest (which meant dispatching buffalo with a hunting rifle—when you buy grass-fed buffalo steak at your local supermarket, it comes from ranches like that one). I also drank a cup of warm blood straight from the neck vein of one of the animals, which I would not recommend to anyone.

For some of the battle stuff I took a bunch of classes at Blackwater, the private military contractor. I wanted to know how do you actually win (or lose) a gunfight, how do you clear a house, what happens to your mind in those situations and how to people who kill for a living (professional warrior types) deal with it. Most of the philosophical stuff about combat—"you have to love other people's bodies more than your own"—comes from these retired Special Forces guys, particularly one guy from Seal Team Six who I became friends with.

In terms of my process, I would basically write and write and every time I hit a gap in my knowledge I would stop writing and go and read everything I could on that subject. If I didn't trust the book knowledge I would go out and do the real thing—learn the actual skill or sleep in the actual place. For instance, because the Comanches and other plains tribes depended so heavily on the buffalo and used the animal so completely, I knew I needed to understand what the inside of a buffalo actually smelled like, what the blood actually tasted like, etc. I learned how to start a fire with two sticks, to twist cordage from plant fibers and sinew. I became friends with some Comanches and they made me a traditional bow and arrows—which turned out to be much harder to shoot than even a modern bow. I went hunting with blackpowder rifles and acquired some old blackpowder pistols to figure out they worked and how reliable (and unreliable) they were. I’d ridden horses a few times before, but didn’t know much about them, so I hung around horse people and took lessons until I felt comfortable enough to write about horses.

Texas was built on the destruction of two previous cultures, the Native Americans and the Mexicans. At one point, Eli says that "There was nothing you could take that had not belonged to some other person." Is it possible to create without destroying?
It is not just Texas that was built on the destruction of other cultures. It is every other single state in America. There were likely about 20 million people living in North America when modern Europeans began to arrive in the 1500’s. In New York State alone, there were dozens of native American tribes and nations. Of course a few individuals survived here and there, but for all practical purposes, we (of European descent) wiped them all out. We have this national mythology that our ancestors carved out a country from the wilderness, but in fact there was no wilderness. The entire continent, every square inch of it, was already claimed. There was no “free” land—the whole place had been settled for 10 or 15 thousand years. 

The book is told mainly from three different perspectives, always in the Eli-Jeanne-Peter order, rather than in the order those characters appear in the family genealogy. Why did you choose to order the chapters in this way? Do you see Jeanne as being more of a direct descendant of Eli than his own son?
Most of the reason you do that is because you want to alternate the sound and tones and rhythms for the audience—the same way a composer might. And of course you also have to make sure you are telling the story in a sensible way. But this was not something I decided on at the beginning. I changed the chapters around constantly as I wrote the book. It’s useful to make plans and outlines, but you have to be willing to discard them as soon as you see the truth of what comes out on the page.  

What was it like writing from a female point-of-view? Did Jeanne's position as a woman in a man's world—and a woman who doesn't particularly identify with other women of her time—make it easier for you to imagine her inner life?
I think with any character, male or female, young or old, modern or historical, you know almost nothing about them when you start writing and you always looking for some commonality you have with them. When you find this, it becomes the thread you use to pull yourself inside them. To paraphrase Eudora Welty, our job is to inhabit the skins of all our characters, whether they are saints or serial killers. I think actors go through a very similar process, though of course they are working with a character who has already been invented.

Your work has been compared to a lot of literary greats—Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway, just to name a few. Were any of these authors a particular inspiration to you, and if not, who is?
I think the people I mostly look to for inspiration are the big modernists. If I had to pick three, it would be Woolf, Faulkner and Joyce. Of course there is a lot to learn from Hemingway and Steinbeck, from Welty, from Flannery O’Connor. But I’m pretty omnivorous. I’ll read the postmodernists. I’ll read detective fiction. I’ll pretty much read anything until I see I’m not going to learn from it. 

What are you working on next?
I think it’s time for me to take a break from this modernist stuff, so the new book is leaning a lot more toward magic realism.

RELATED IN BOOKPAGE
Read our review of The Son.

Jamie Ford conducted his interview with BookPage while crouched on the floor of the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, seeking good cell reception and a pocket of quiet. While he briefly worried he might look like a homeless person lying on the floor of an international airport, he more or less embraces the whirlwind that comes with life on the bestseller list.

“I’m grateful in all kinds of ways,” Ford says. “I could spend less time in airports and be happy, but it’s a good problem to have.”

The author of 2009’s fantastic debut Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (which has sold more than a million copies) is now beginning the road show to promote his second novel, Songs of Willow Frost, a similarly sadness-tinged story also set in historic Seattle. When we talked, he was on his way to speak at an Asian-Pacific American conference in Washington, D.C., but some of his favorite travels are more off the beaten path. He joined a discussion with a homeless book group in Madison, Wisconsin, and another group at a women’s prison in rural Washington state.

“Readers are readers,” he says, in a casual way that makes him sound less like a successful author and more like someone you’d want to have a beer with.

In the haunting Songs of Willow Frost, Ford tells the story of William Eng, a young Chinese-American orphan in 1930s Seattle, a time that was high on joblessness and low on hope. William lives in an orphanage run by strict nuns (were there any other kind then?) since his sick mother, Liu Song, was taken from their small Chinatown apartment. When the head nun takes a group of boys to see a movie, William is convinced the delicately beautiful actress on the screen is his mother.

“[S]he wasn’t just wearing makeup, she was Chinese like Anna May Wong, the only Oriental star he’d ever seen. Her distinctive looks and honeyed voice drew wolf whistles from the older boys, which drew reprimands from Sister Briganti, who cursed in Latin and Italian. But as William stared at the flickering screen, he was stunned silent, mouth agape, popcorn spilling. The singer was introduced as Willow Frost—a stage name, William almost said out loud, it had to be.”

“I gravitate toward stronger females. I married an alpha female and we’re raising alpha daughters.”

William runs away from the orphanage to find Willow Frost, who is performing in a series of concerts around the Pacific Northwest. When he catches up with her, he finds out the brutal truth about his past and what happened to his mother all those years ago.

Liu Song is a singularly strong character whose story lingers after the book ends. Ford doesn’t know any other kind of woman.

“I gravitate toward stronger females,” he says. “I married an alpha female, and we’re raising alpha daughters. My grandmother on my Caucasian side was a Southern woman who cussed like a sailor and chewed snuff.”

Ford’s father’s family is of Chinese heritage, and his paternal grandmother, Yin Yin, was so strong-willed, he says, that she renamed Ford’s cousin just because she wanted to.

“My cousin Stephanie didn’t know her name was Delores until she was 16 and went to get her driver’s license,” he says. “That was just Yin Yin.”

Ford and his wife have four daughters and two sons between them—“We’re a Brady Bunch family”—three of whom still live at home. He is, admittedly and happily, outnumbered by strong women.

“Once a month I go to the store and buy tampons and Ben & Jerry’s,” he says. “It’s my offering to the gods.”

The backdrop of show business in Songs of Willow Frost also comes from Ford’s own family. His grandfather was a Hollywood bit actor and martial arts instructor.

If William and Liu Song are the novel’s main characters, Seattle plays a close third. Ford paints an amazingly vivid picture of a long-gone place and time, a city that smelled of “seaweed drying on the mudflats of Puget Sound,” inhabited by men standing in line for free soup and bread. It is a lovingly and beautifully rendered portrait of his hometown (Ford lives in Montana now), but he isn’t blind to Seattle’s quirks and pretentions.

“The first things you think about—traffic, Starbucks, Amazon—are things that aren’t always great stuff,” he said. “It’s the land of Whole Foods and utility kilts. I shop at Whole Foods—I bring my own bags. They’re just made out of baby seal skins. I think it’s the most literate place in America, and it’s very polyethnic. But it’s also a city that’s freighted—it’s the passive-aggressive capital of America.”

Having set two novels in Seattle, he may branch out in the future so he doesn’t get pegged as a one-town guy.

“I don’t want to be like Woody Allen—every movie set in New York City,” he says.

In fact, he had another novel already written after Hotel on the Corner, but he ultimately shelved what he called “an angst-filled second novel that I was really second-guessing. It stirred my well of self-doubt.”

He decided it was filled with what he deems “performance writing”—writing for other writers or critics.

“That very inward-looking writing, I blanch when I see it,” he says. “No one needs to read a 14-page sentence. It seems indulgent to me, that black belt-level literary stuff. I just want to disappear into the story. Luckily, there’s room for all appetites.”

Ford is part of a men’s book group. If that sounds daunting for the other members, think again.

“I’m just one of the guys there. It’s better for all concerned,” he says. “Several of the guys are English literature majors and their reading taste is far above mine.”

Ford gathers himself as his flight time nears, cheerfully noting one small perk of spending time on the floor of an airport.

“I think I’ve collected $1.75 in change,” he said. “I’m halfway to a Starbucks.”

In her second novel to be published in the U.S., British author Jo Baker takes on one of literature’s most hallowed works: Pride and Prejudice. Reaching beneath the surface glamour of ball gowns and verdant estates, Longbourn exposes the hard, manual labor required to keep Elizabeth Bennet’s repeatedly muddied petticoats a pristine white. Though the Pride and Prejudice hook might be what attracts readers, Longbourn proves to be a fascinating novel in its own right. We asked Baker a few questions about the new book.

What inspired you to write this book?
I’m a massive fan of Jane Austen, and have re-read her novels countless times.

I’d also always known that members of my family had been in service, and this perhaps made me more alert to the servants’ presence in Pride and Prejudice than I otherwise would have been. The catalyst, though, was one particular line in Austen’s novel: “The very shoe roses for Netherfield were got by proxy.” I just couldn’t stop thinking about the reality of what it meant. I wondered who “proxy” was, and how s/he felt about having to go and fetch decorations for someone else’s dancing shoes, in the pouring rain, when none of the Bennet girls are prepared themselves to go. And that’s what started to make the story fizz.

"I’d say it’s in conversation with the earlier novel—or perhaps a “reading” of it."

How would you describe Longbourn’s relationship to Pride and Prejudice? Would you say it is a corrective, like Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone or Jean Rhys' The Wide Sargasso Sea?
I wouldn’t say corrective—I don’t think there’s anything in Austen’s novels to correct. I’d say it’s in conversation with the earlier novel—or perhaps a “reading” of it.

This novel covers topics that Austen is often criticized for ignoring: the serving class, the Napoleonic Wars, race relations. Why do you feel that Austen didn't cover these topics in her work?
Although I’m reluctant to speculate. . . .

Austen wrote honestly and truthfully—which is part of her enduring appeal—and it’s impossible to write honestly and truthfully about material that doesn’t have immediacy for you.

It’s not as simplistic as “write what you know”; I realized recently that every book I’ve written, I’ve always thought, this is the one book that I was born to write. Every single time. And then I go on and write the next one, about something else entirely, but there is nonetheless the same kind of personal, intimate connectedness to it, and that’s what makes the writing truthful.

I do also feel it’s a bit pointless to criticize Austen for not writing what she didn’t write. The novels wouldn’t be better for being different. Although there are a few exceptions, I do think that kind of grand social-conscience novel evolved a little later—with the expansive narratives of writers like Charles Dickens, and Victor Hugo, and George Elliot.

In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth famously observes, "what praise is more valuable than the praise of an intelligent servant?" You use the treatment of the servants as a similar mark of character in Longbourn, yet even the most sympathetic of Austen's original characters don't give much consideration at all to the servants. (I started to wonder how low a bar Mrs. Reynolds had for Darcy.) Do you think that any of the servants at Longbourn would praise any of the Bennets?
There’s a danger of spoilers if I explore this question too fully! I’ll tread carefully.

None of the relationships between upstairs and down are uncomplicated, or are left untouched by the events of the novel. Someone who might have been unquestioningly loyal at the start of the book, might, by the end, feel rather differently . . . so they might praise their employers at one point in the book, but not at another . . if that makes sense.

I do find that notion of “the best master” really problematic. Even the best master is still a master—and therefore in a position of privilege and power over others—whether or not he chooses to abuse that power and privilege. Mrs Reynolds’ sentiment about Darcy has always made me feel really queasy.

"I think Elizabeth probably had the best talent for friendship—but Lydia would be best for staggering home at 3 a.m. with. I do have a sneaking sympathy for Mary."

Money is a concern that is at the heart of much of Austen's work and it's also central in Longbourn. What do you think money represents to your characters?
I’m very aware that these were turbulent times; there’d been crop failures, an ongoing war that strangled trade, changes in industry and agriculture that were radically altering people’s way of life. In the north, the Luddites were breaking the new machinery that was making them redundant—and their actions were put down violently by the Militia. Most people had no political representation at all.

So I know, times being what they were, that money and security would be issues for everyone below stairs. I imagine, for example, that Sarah thinks the Bennet girls don’t know how lucky they are, with their thousand pounds in the four percents. But the gulf between classes is so wide, that she doesn’t even really think to feel jealous of them.

Having said all that, Sarah isn’t really that bothered about money itself—she’s more hungry for experience than financial gain—and she knows that she can, when there is work to be had, work for a living. An option which funnily enough offers her one kind of freedom that the Bennet girls don’t have.

This isn't your first foray into historical fiction—but what sort of research did you do into this period? Was it easy/possible to find many firsthand accounts from those "in service" at the time?
There’s already quite a lot of excellent history being done about servants and domestic life in England in this period. Both Carolyn Steedman and Amanda Vickery have written brilliantly on domestic life the period, and Ben Wilson’s book on popular culture at the time was invaluable. So I read a good deal, but I also did some practical research—employing some of the cleaning methods used at the time around my own home.

Some of the research was done a long time before the novel was even thought of, though: I was lucky enough to grow up in a village where was a Georgian vicarage, rather dilapidated and not re-developed at the time. It had a big echo-y kitchen and all the outbuildings—including a necessary house and disused stables. My best friend was the vicar’s daughter, and we’d play out there all the time—so I grew up knowing the geography and feel of that kind of house very well.

Did writing the book make you feel differently about any of the original Pride and Prejudice characters?
I think it allowed me to explore some sympathies. I’ve always felt for Mrs Bennet, for example. And I found myself understanding her a little better, after imagining her life up until the events of Pride and Prejudice. Five daughters—all those pregnancies. I don’t envy her that.

What do you think Austen would make of her continued fame today?
I think she’d be pleased. In life, she was interested to know how her books were getting on, and keen to hear positive reactions to them. What she’d make of being on the bank note, I don’t know—particularly as it’s not an unproblematic image of her.

Who is your favorite Bennet sister?
Depends on context. I think Elizabeth probably had the best talent for friendship—but Lydia would be best for staggering home at 3 a.m. with. I do have a sneaking sympathy for Mary. She doesn’t always say the right thing, she is awkward and overlooked, and I really can empathize with that.

Why did you call the book 'Longbourn'?
Longbourn House itself is so important to the book—a good deal of the action happens in and around the place. But the word itself also contains ideas of stoicism and endurance—something carried for a long time. And this is key to both the story and to the servants’ experience. They have to just keep on keeping on, carrying their burdens, getting on with things, day after day, however they feel about it.

What are you working on next?
​A new book—but I’m feeling quite quiet about it, sorry.

Elizabeth Gilbert makes a triumphant return to fiction with The Signature of All Things, a sweeping saga that covers centuries and continents, and stars a singular heroine: brilliant scientist Alma Whittaker.

It's been a while since you wrote a book that wasn't based on your own life! Was it hard to turn back to fiction, where the storyline is only limited by your imagination? Did you find that freedom exhilarating, or frightening? Or both?

Exhilarating! Liberating! Emancipating! Joyful! (Are there any other words I can use, with exclamation marks, to get this point across?) I got my start as a writer of literary fiction, and always assumed that fiction would be my life's path but then—all through my 30s—I felt that I needed the craft of writing to serve a different purpose for me (namely, to help me sort some stuff out, in a rather intimate and self-searching manner.) Now that, thankfully, my life has an even keel again, it really felt like it was time to go back to fiction, back to my heritage. And once I began the novel, I felt awash in such a sense of thrill—I had utterly forgotten the pleasures and freedoms of invention. I loved every minute of it.

Tell us about the significance of the title.

"The Signature of All Things" is the title of a 16th century botanical/divine theory posited by a German shoemaker-turned-mystic named Jacob Boehm, who believed that God so loved the world that He had hidden in the design of each plant on earth some clue for humans as to that plant's usefulness. (For instance: Walnuts are good for headaches, and are also—helpfully—shaped like brains. Sage is good for the liver, and its leaves are shaped like livers. Etc, etc.) It was such a wild and idealistic and wacky notion, and it was already well out of favor by scientists of the 18th and 19th century, but I used it for my title both because one of my characters still espouses it, and also because I love the imagination that would conjure up such a magical kind of taxonomy. What's more, every single character in my novel is still, in their own way, searching for The Signature of All Things—trying to find the code, trying to crack the secret behind the botanical world (whether through science, religion or art).

This is an old-fashioned novel in the best sense of the term: Sweeping, expansive, epic, and set in exotic locales. Do you feel it falls in a particular literary tradition? What books inspired you?

Anyone who reads even two pages of this novel will recognize its inspiration from the big 19th-century novels of Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, Stevenson and—especially in the careful telling of a woman's emotional and geographical journey—Henry James. That's my team, those big, expansive writers—those are the books I have always most loved and the writers I have always worshipped. I wanted to try my hand at such a book, in homage, and also as a dare to myself, and lastly as a way of entertaining myself. Most of all, I think you should always write the book you would most want to read —and this is the sort of book I love reading. Hilary Mantel's two most recent novels (Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies) were also inspiring, since she managed to figure out how to write a novel about the 15th century without pretending that her novel had been written DURING the 15th century. That's a subtle but vital distinction, and I tried to do the same with my book. In other words, it's a contemporary novel ABOUT the 19th century—not a book that's trying to pass as one written by George Eliot.

"As a woman whose life and dignity have also been saved many times by my love and passion for my work, I understand this sort of character completely."

What do you admire most about Alma Whittaker, your heroine?

Her passion for her work. I do not think there have been enough novels written about women who love their work (unless, oddly, it happens to be detective work or police work—interestingly, there are plenty of those!). This novel has romantic love in it, as well, but mostly it is a book about a woman who adores what she does (namely, the study of botany) and who is willing to give over the entirety of her towering intellect toward her studies. That love, that desire for knowledge (for its own sake), is the central guiding thread that runs through her life, from earliest consciousness to her final days.

As a woman whose life and dignity have also been saved many times by my love and passion for my work, I understand this sort of character completely. I was so excited to give her an education, a library, a laboratory, a means of publishing. And the great thing is, she is not historically implausible. I had no trouble finding real-life Almas in 18th and 19th century history—tremendously productive sisters of science. This book is also a tribute to them.

What research did you do for this book?

Mostly, I just read hundreds and hundreds of books, for hours and hours a day, over the course of about three years. I read books about 18th and 19th century botanical exploration, about the early days of the evolution debate, about the founding of the city of Philadelphia, about missionaries in Tahiti, about the first pharmacists in America, about Victorian pornography, about transcendentalism, spiritualism, hypnotism, abolition, whaling . . . and so on. I also "borrowed a brain"—by hiring my friend Margaret Cordi, an old college friend and contributor to Harpers Magazine, to help me, and to fill in the blanks in my own investigations. (I would send her emails like, "Find me all the first-hand accounts you can of the 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic in Philadelphia!" and a week later she would send me an amazing dossier.) I also traveled to Kew Gardens in London, to look at their herbarium, and also to the Hortus Gardens in Amsterdam. I went on a pilgrimage to meet the greatest living female moss scientist in America, in order to test out my ideas about mosses and evolution upon her. And I took a big trip to the South Pacific, to get a sense of color, light and sound there—for the part of the novel that takes place in Tahiti. But mostly, I just read until my eyes turned to custard. There's really no other way to do it.

One refreshing thing about this book was that, though it stars a woman and features a marriage plot, Alma's central pursuit in life is not love but knowledge. Was this something you particularly wanted to write about?

Indeed! And I decidedly did not want to write a novel where the woman can only have one of two possible endings to her life (the two 19th-century endings for all heroines, I mean)—which are 1) you are lucky enough to marry the landed gentry and end up happy, or 2) you are unlucky enough to make a sensual error and then end up punished for it with poverty, ruin or death. Don't get me wrong, I love Lizzie Bennet (ending #1) and Anna Karenina (ending #2) but these are not the endings most women get in life. (Neither then nor now.) Most of us end up somewhere in the wide in-between—neither a fairy tale, nor a tragedy. And the most interesting women to me are the ones who do not necessarily get everything they wanted in life, but who manage to build dignified and fascinating existences in the world, nonetheless—and at the end of their lives have the satisfaction of saying, "Well, that was all very difficult, but certainly satisfying and worth doing!" Alma is just such a person, and it is her passion for learning that brings her that dignity, that satisfaction.

The debate between science and religion that was launched during Alma's lifetime continues today. What about it has changed? What hasn't? Do you think it's a conflict that can ever be resolved?

I think we are a long way from solving it, and I think something terribly important to humanity has been lost in the battle. For most of Western civilization, there really was no difference between being a man of science, a man of god, and a man of the arts. Science, divinity and artistic endeavor were three strands of the same braid—and all of them pulling toward the same beautiful desire (to want to understand the workings of this curious and beautiful world). But in the 19th century, they all broke apart, and went their separate ways—to the point that Science, Divinity and Artistry even hardly talk to each other anymore, are rarely seen in the same room, and still fight over the custody of the children.

The biggest tragedy to me is that we now live in a world full of scientific minds who are absolutely absent of devotion, and religious minds who are absolutely absent of reason. (And the artistic minds are just flailing around somewhere in the outskirts, often seeming to have totally lost BOTH reason and devotion.) Somehow we have to find a way to pull that braid back together again, because that's the magnificent triumvirate that pulls us forward into wonder and majesty. It seems simple to me (I have plenty of room in my mind for God, for science and for art) but that sort of unity only works when everyone sheds their dogma. So maybe not so simple, I guess?

You and your husband also run a small business. How do you balance that work with your writing?

The business—an import store in New Jersey called Two Buttons—was a great escape for me at times during the height of the Eat, Pray, Love tsunami. It was such a balm at times to just disappear into the really mundane work of sorting out jewelry, or pricing statues, or ringing up people's furniture purchases. And I love traveling with my husband to Southeast Asia on buying trips. But assuredly, while the business is in both of our names, it is truly his baby. It takes up very little of my time, other than the time that I want to give over to it. For me its a hobby, but for him, it's a passion and a full-time career. It works out nicely—he has his world, and I have my own.

What are you working on next?

Another novel! It will be a while before I can turn my attention it, because I'm doing a lot of travel and touring for The Signature of All Things, but I want to stay with fiction for a while because it's such a pleasure. I think— after the buttoned up world of my 19th-century female characters—I want to write a novel about girls behaving recklessly. It will be a release, I think, to let somebody go wild.