WomensHistoryReads interview: Kristina McMorris

I've been a huge fan of Kristina McMorris for years, and I'm even more excited about her upcoming book SOLD ON A MONDAY, coming out this fall from our mutual publisher Sourcebooks! Kristina isn't just a savvy and talented writer, but one of the warmest and most generous personalities out there in the historical fiction writing community. Thrilled to share her interview for #WomensHistoryReads today. Enjoy!

Kristina McMorris

Greer: Tell us about a woman (or group of women) from the past who has inspired your writing.

Kristina: When I initially set out to pen my first novel, Letters from Home, my only intention was to craft a story inspired by my grandparents' WWII courtship letters. What I didn't expect was, in the midst of researching, to also find inspiration in historical accounts from members of the Women's Army Corps (WAC). Often serving on the front lines, these brave veterans returned home to find themselves in a society largely resistant to change. In fact, many were urged to swap out their uniforms for traditional homemakers' aprons and never speak about their extraordinary service. Through my novel, I felt honored to help share their stories.

And years later, I felt the same while writing a novella that featured members of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) of WWII. Just like the WACs, their courage and incredible skill contributed heavily to the Allied victory, yet a great many years passed before the majority of these amazing women received the recognition they deserved. 

Greer: How would you describe what you write?

Kristina: While technically my novels are considered historical fiction, I often joke that I view my books as "literary Advil." Meaning: hopefully the reader enjoys the sugarcoating of a story on the outside, not realizing how much "good stuff" (i.e. history) they're actually digesting along the way. 

Greer: Love it! And finally, what’s your next book about and when will we see it?

Kristina: My next novel, Sold on a Monday, will be released on August 28th, and I can't wait to share it! Inspired by a shocking newspaper picture that haunted me for months, my Depression-era story features a young, ambitious reporter whose photo of two children being sold on a farmhouse porch leads to his big break—but has devastating consequences for everyone involved. 

(Speaking of notable women in history, the great columnist Nellie Bly even serves as a powerful inspiration to one of my main characters in this story!) 

Greer: Nellie Bly! We have that in common! She's glorious.

Kristina: And now, for you, my friend...

Each of your historical novels, including the forthcoming Woman Ninety-Nine, centers on a unique female character who breaks the traditional mold of her time by making daring choices. Of the three protagonists, with whom would you most prefer to: travel the world? be held as hostages together? switch lives for a year? 

Greer: What a thrilling set of questions! The possibilities!

I suppose it makes sense to start with Arden from The Magician's Lie, who starts out her book tied to a chair with multiple pairs of handcuffs, locked in a room with an armed officer of the law with only her wits and her words to help her escape. So clearly she's the one I want to be hostages with because I think she'd have the best chance of getting us out! I'd travel the world with Kate Warne of Girl in Disguise, first female detective and downright brilliant woman, whose particular set of skills would help us settle in and befriend the locals anywhere and everywhere we went. Spies make good travel companions, right?

And I'd switch lives for a year with Charlotte Smith from Woman Ninety-Nine -- though at first it might seem odd that I'd want to include the period of time she spends trapped in a notorious insane asylum, where she risks her sanity, her future and her life in an attempt to rescue her beloved sister Phoebe from permanent commitment. Then again, her time in the asylum opens her eyes to broader possibilities for her life than she was ever exposed to during her pampered upbringing in 1880s San Francisco, and she finds the world inside the walls of Goldengrove isn't all bad. One of the ways I describe the book is as a 19th-century "Orange is the New Black" -- a group of women who don't fit society's mold, but band together in a fascinating society of their own making. I really enjoyed the time I spent with these characters while I was writing them. I can't wait for everyone to meet not just Charlotte and Phoebe, but spitfire Martha, canny operator Nora, damaged Celia, and the rest of the inmates of Goldengrove.

Want to know more about Kristina and her books? Of course you do! Here are a few links to get you started:

Web: www.KristinaMcMorris.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kristina.mcmorris/

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4384611.Kristina_McMorris

WomensHistoryReads interview: Erin Blakemore

As you've surely noticed by now, March is well behind us, and I'm still publishing #WomensHistoryReads interviews every day. Obviously there are far more than 31 women writing today inspired by far more than 31 women from history -- but that's only part of the motivation. Today's interviewee, Erin Blakemore, made some great points on Twitter a few weeks back about Women's History Month, about which many of us have mixed feelings. It's great to shine a light on women's stories during that period. BUT it's a huge injustice to only shine a light on women's stories during that period. The real goal is to one day have women's history be so well-known, widespread and acknowledged, it makes Women's History Month obsolete. Obviously we're not there yet.

So how do we get there? All year long, keep reading and writing about women's stories, spreading the word, and seeking out the work of great writers like Erin. More from her below.

Erin Blakemore

Greer: How would you describe what you write?

Erin: I write voice-driven nonfiction that’s underpinned by historical context and deep research. I’m a freelance journalist, so that means everything from reporting on the hidden racial history of America’s highways to what supermarkets tell us about American women and how their sexuality was used to fuel consumption in the mid 20th century. I write a lot about science, too, for outlets like the Washington Post and Popular Science. But my favorite work always incorporates two things: women and history. 

Fewer people know this about me, but I write fiction, as well. My first book (historical fiction about a famous woman, of course!) is currently on submission. I like to think that I write nonfiction that reads like a novel and fiction that comes to life as if it were fact, but I’ll let my readers be the judges! 

Greer: Ooh, good luck on submission and I very much look forward to reading your fiction! What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical women?

Erin: *leans on elbows* How much time do you have, Greer? 

Seriously speaking, there are so many frustrations in researching women’s lives. A lot of lesser-known women fail basic notoriety tests that keep information about them out of the public domain, so it can be really tough to find out more without going into an archive. (Want to know why they are seen as “not noteworthy enough” to be written about? Because nobody wrote about them to begin with…which kind of dooms them to a prolonged state of non-noteworthiness! Go figure.) 

If you do go into an archive, papers can be unprocessed or scant. Or there may not be papers at all. This, of course, is a function of systemic biases that tell us women’s lives are too domestic, or too unremarkable, and that interfered with women’s abilities to document their own lives, either because they spent their time laboring for others or didn’t have the tools or skills with which to read or write. 

Then there are the financial challenges, especially for an independent researcher like me. I can’t afford to jaunt off to wherever to dig into an archive, and academic resources are largely closed. Luckily, I have generous friends in academia and some reference librarian-level skills when it comes to tracking down information. 

That said, I find researching historical women incredibly exciting and invigorating. It’s so meaningful to meet someone new and help tell her story, and the detective work has the thrill of discovery. It’s such a privilege to get to do this work. 

Greer: Agreed. And your readers appreciate it. If you could pick one woman from history to put in every high school history textbook, who would it be?

Erin: Clara Lemlich Shavelson. As a young garment worker, she sparked a gigantic shirtwaist strike years before the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire by giving an impassioned speech in Yiddish to a packed house at Cooper Union. As one of the farbrente maydlakh—Yiddish for “fiery girls”—she helped lead what was the largest strike ever by women at the time. We’re talking over 20,000 impoverished, seemingly disempowered young women walking out on their jobs and being harassed by police, hired thugs, and hecklers. 

Clara was a force to be reckoned with, and she didn’t play around. She insisted that men and women be treated equally within the labor movement, got blacklisted from her job, and wouldn’t back down from her revolutionary ideals, even when they cost her her friends and her connections within the movement. And she didn’t give up when she grew up, either: She organized boycotts and strikes, raised hell, and stood in solidarity with others until her death at age 96. 

Clara was a Ukrainian immigrant who lived in the tenements of New York as a young woman and who overcame a substantial amount of adversity in her youth. She fought tooth and nail for what she believed in—and was willing to give up a lot for her ideals. She didn’t always win, but she was resourceful and gritty. I didn’t learn her name until I was older, but I would have found her story incredibly inspirational as a younger person.

The history textbooks I encountered as a student touched really briefly on the labor movement, but it would have meant a lot to see someone like Clara Lemlich in their pages. At the very minimum, her speech is a must-read. It’s pretty brief, too: 

"I am a working girl; one of those who are on strike against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in general terms. What we are here for is to decide whether we shall strike or shall not strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared now.” 

Short and sweet…but incredibly powerful. 

And now a question for you, Greer…what’s an anachronism that drives you crazy in an adaptation of a historical event or period? 

Greer: The completely modern woman plopped down in a historical environment really irritates the heck out of me. And books like that give historical fiction a bad name. Mary Sharratt made a good point in yesterday's interview that "if you sit down and do the research, you will discover that every epoch had its radical voices, movers and shakers, extraordinary women who rocked the establishment." So it isn't that our characters can't swim upstream against the racist, sexist, conformist attitudes of their day. They can and should. But the best historical fiction rarely features a character who's only a mouthpiece for modern opinions and walks around 16th-century London or Gold Rush California commenting on society's narrow-mindedness. As Mary Doria Russell put it so succinctly, "The past is not just now, with hats." Historical novelists really owe it to themselves and their readers to get inside the minds of the women and men of the time where their work is set. Then it means so much more when we see what we do have in common, where the parallels between then and now are strongest. In my opinion, that's the great gift of historical fiction -- helping us see how far we've come, and how far we haven't. 

Learn more about Erin's work at erinblakemore.com or on Twitter @heroinebook.

WomensHistoryReads interview: Mary Sharratt

I've been waiting what seems like forever to talk about Mary Sharratt's latest novel ECSTASY, which follows Alma Mahler's extraordinary life in turn-of-the-20th-century Vienna. I heard Mary speak about this book on a panel last June at the Historical Novel Society Conference and was instantly entranced. Then I managed to get my hands on an ARC and was blown away both by the gorgeous cover and the story within. And now the book is finally coming out -- tomorrow! So grab your copy ASAP. You'll be riveted by the tale of this talented, brilliant woman who was truly ahead of her time.

Mary Sharratt

Greer: Tell us about a woman from the past who has inspired your writing.

Mary: From my first novel Summit Avenue, published in 2000, I have always written historical fiction centered on strong women. But I didn’t write my first work of biographical fiction about a real life historical woman until my 2010 novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill. The inspiration arose when I moved to the Pendle region of Lancashire in Northern England where the true story of the Pendle Witches of 1612 literally cast their spell on me and changed me forever. 

In 1612, seven women and two men from Pendle Forest were hanged for witchcraft. But the most notorious of the accused, Bess Southerns, aka Old Demdike, cheated the hangman by dying in prison before she could even come to trial. This is how court clerk Thomas Potts describes her in The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster:

She was a very old woman, about the age of Foure-score yeares, and had been a Witch for fiftie yeares. Shee dwelt in the Forrest of Pendle, a vast place, fitte for her profession: What shee committed in her time, no man knowes ... Shee was a generall agent for the Devill in all these partes: no man escaped her, or her Furies.

Not bad for an eighty-year-old lady. Once I read this, I fell in love. I simply had to write a book about this amazing woman. Bess became the guiding voice and power behind my novel. 

Reading the trial transcripts against the grain, I was astounded how her strength of character blazed forth in the document written to vilify her. She freely admitted to being a healer and a cunning woman, and she instructed her daughter and granddaughter in the ways of magic. Her neighbors called on her to cure their children and their cattle. What fascinated me was not that Bess was arrested on witchcraft charges but that the authorities turned on her only near the end of her long, productive career. She practiced her craft for decades before anybody dared to interfere with her.

Greer: What’s your next book about and when will we see it?

Mary: My new novel Ecstasy, released on April 10, is drawn from the dramatic life of Alma Schindler Mahler (1879-1964), one of the most controversial women in the twentieth century. Her husbands and lovers included composer Gustav Mahler, Bauhaus-founder Walter Gropius, artist Oskar Kokoschka, and poet Franz Werfel. Yet no man could ever claim to possess her. She was her own woman to the last, polyamorous long before it was cool, and a composer in her own right. Sadly most commentators, including some of her own biographers, focus not on her talent or creativity but instead bemoan how she “failed” to be the ideal woman for the great men in her life. Alma, like Lilith, was a strong and independently-minded woman who claimed full expression of her sexuality only to be demonized as a man-destroying monster. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s observation that well-behaved women seldom make history could have been written about Alma. 

Coming of age in the glittering artistic hotbed of turn-of-the-twentieth century Vienna, young Alma Maria Schindler was a most accomplished pianist—her teacher thought she was good enough to study at the Vienna Conservatory. However, Alma didn’t want a career of public performance. Instead she yearned to be a composer. Her lieder, composed under the guidance of her mentor and lover, Alexander von Zemlinsky, are arresting, emotional, and highly original and can be compared with the early work of Zemlinsky’s other famous student, Arnold Schoenberg.

But the odds were stacked against her. In turn-of-the-twentieth century Vienna, women who strived for a livelihood in the arts were mocked as the “third sex”—the fate of Alma’s friend, the sculptor Ilse Conrat. When a towering genius like Gustav Mahler asked Alma to give up her composing career as a condition of their marriage, she reluctantly succumbed.  

Yet underneath it all she was still that questing young woman who yearned to compose symphonies and operas. Shortly before her marriage, twenty-two-year-old Alma wrote in her diary, “I have two souls: I know it.” Born in an era that struggled to recognize women as full-fledged human beings, Alma experienced a fundamental split in her psyche—the rift between herself as a distinct creative individual and herself as an object of male desire. The suppression of her true self to become the woman Mahler wanted her to be was unsustainable and inhuman. Eventually the authentic Alma erupted out of this false persona.  

What emerged was a woman far ahead of her time, who rejected the shackles of condoned feminine behavior and insisted on her sexual and creative freedom. Alma eventually returned to composing and went on to publish fourteen of her songs. Three other lieder have been discovered posthumously. Now her work is regularly performed and recorded. 

Alma was not only a composer but what in German is called a Lebenskünstlerin, or life artist—she pioneered new ways of being as a woman that was in itself a work of art. 

Greer:What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical women?

Mary: I’m on a mission to write women back into history and I find this both exhilarating and daunting. To a large extent, women have been written out of history. Their lives and deeds have become lost to us. To uncover the buried histories of women, we historical novelists must act as detectives, studying the sparse clues that have been handed down to us. To create engaging and nuanced portraits of women in history, we must learn to read between the lines and fill in the blanks.

At its best, historical fiction can play a crucial role in writing women back into history and challenging our misperceptions about women in the past.

Unfortunately we, as writers, can run into problems when we present a view of historical women that challenges common misperceptions. On the one hand, readers and critics are justifiably skeptical about novelists who present plucky historical heroines with attitudes that feel too contemporary and thus anachronistic to their time and place. On the other hand, if you sit down and do the research, you will discover that every epoch had its radical voices, movers and shakers, extraordinary women who rocked the establishment. Think of Sappho, Hypatia, Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth I of England, Aphra Behn, Anne Bonny the Pirate Queen, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Parks, to name a few. Too often readers and, unfortunately some reviewers, appear to have a distorted and uninformed view of women in history and seem too quick to label any strong heroine anachronistic, even if the author has backed up the fiction with considerable research. 

My hope is that as more authors delve into the lives of historical women and present them in all their nuanced glory, public perceptions on women’s history will undergo a long overdue sea change. 

My question for Greer: Play matchmaker: what unsung woman from history would you most like to read a book about, and who should write it?

Greer: I've asked so many people this question and enjoyed all their answers -- and I can't believe I didn't think ahead to come up with an answer of my own! 

I found out just last year that the much-heralded Wright Brothers, Orville and Wilbur, had a much-less-heralded sister, Katharine! (And please don't judge me when I admit that I found this out from the TV show "Drunk History," which actually does a great job of digging up interesting lesser-known figures, many of them women who deserve more time in the spotlight.) While the role she played in facilitating their success was definitely a supporting role, one could argue that they wouldn't have been able to get their venture off the ground (as it were) without her. Yet after years and years supporting her brothers, when she struck up a romance with an old beau, Orville stopped speaking to her entirely, and only came to visit her on her deathbed. There are some nonfiction accounts that speak to the facts of her life, but I think what she really needs is a juicy emotional epic that explores her thoughts, fears, joys and sorrows. And nobody does a juicy emotional epic like Ariel Lawhon (whose I Was Anastasia just came out a couple weeks back, and is totally a must-read.)

Read more about Mary and her books at marysharratt.com.

(And of course, keep checking back here daily for more installments of #WomensHistoryReads!)

WomensHistoryReads interview: Stephanie Thornton

The order in which I've been publishing my #WomensHistoryReads interviews has no particular logic to it. Unless someone has a book coming out on a particular day (like Stephanie Dray last week) I've been putting things together largely by instinct and gut feeling. But! Since Weina Dai Randel mentioned Stephanie Thornton yesterday, it made perfect sense to introduce you to her, and her upcoming book American Princess, today.

Stephanie Thornton

Greer: If you could pick one woman from history to put in every high school history textbook, who would it be?

Stephanie: I teach high school history and let me tell you, that’s a tough question because so many famous women are omitted from today’s textbooks! I’m going to play favorites here and go with Pharaoh Hatshepsut of 18th Dynasty Egypt, although Empress Theodora of the Byzantine Empire is a close second. (And Genghis Khan’s wife Borte made it possible for him to conquer the world’s largest contiguous empire, but I digress…) Hatshepsut was almost forgotten due to a campaign to wipe her reign from Egypt’s history, but she helped usher in Egypt’s Golden Age through her trade expeditions, foreign conquests, and monumental building campaigns. She was one of the world’s first successful female rulers, and she deserves a whole lot more credit than she gets.

Greer: What’s your next book about and when will we see it?

Stephanie: I’ve jumped to 20th century America to write about Theodore Roosevelt’s hellion daughter, Alice, for my next novel. Alice Roosevelt was America’s first media sensation and became a fixture in Washington politics, since she knew virtually every president from McKinley to Nixon. I'm really excited that American Princess will hit the shelves in March 2019!

Greer: Us too! What book, movie or TV show would your readers probably be surprised to find out you love?

Stephanie: While I write strictly historical fiction, I love a good dose of sci-fi or fantasy. I recently devoured Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, and I’m crossing my fingers that Steven Spielberg does the story justice on the big screen. One of my all-time favorite fantasy reads is A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab, which is set in three versions of London. It’s slightly historical, but really just a fun romp with an unforgettable cast of characters. (Lila Bard is one of my favorite characters ever!)

My question for you: In writing from the point of view of an American Civil War era detective for Girl in Disguise, what was a historical tidbit you uncovered in your research that you just had to find a way to incorporate into the story? 

Greer: There were quite a few! Two spring to mind: one about the city of Chicago, and one about Kate. The Chicago tidbit is that during the period I was writing about, work crews were actually raising certain parts of the city by several feet so a sewer system could be installed. They jacked up buildings on hydraulics -- in some cases, even while the buildings being raised were open for business! So I had to have that scene. As for the Kate tidbit, we only have solid records about four or five cases she worked, and in one of them, she impersonated a fortune teller so she could find out whether a particular woman had been trying to poison her brother so she could get his money after he died. (The woman was totally guilty, by the way, and the fortune teller gambit worked.) I actually wrote the scene to include and it didn't make the cut since it didn't move the story forward, but I made sure there was still a reference to it in the finished book. Truth really is, in so many cases, stranger than fiction.

Website: http://stephanie-thornton.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorStephanieThornton/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/StephMThornton

WomensHistoryReads interview: Weina Dai Randel

With almost 40 #WomensHistoryReads interviews under my belt so far and many more to come (so many!), it's fun to mix up the format every once in a while. Today I've got an interview with Weina Dai Randel, author of The Moon in the Palace, RITA award winner, and all around lovely personality. Instead of a Q&Q&Q&A today, we've got a Q&A&Q&A&Q&A! So much fun for both of us. Here we go! 

Weina Dai Randel

Greer: What’s the last book that blew you away?

Weina: I'm reading the bound manuscript of American Princess by Stephanie Marie Thornton. I'm not finished yet, but oh boy, I can tell you how exciting it was to read this novel. It's about the epic life and loves of Theodore Roosevelt's daughter, Alice. As intriguing as Alice Roosevelt's life was, Thornton wrote in a fierce and fearless voice that absolutely brew me away.  The novel is coming out in March 2019, and I'm sure readers will love this book!  

As I was reading Thornton's novel, I was thinking about the extraordinary women who rose to fame across the world and I couldn't help thinking how different they were. So, Greer, what kind of quality of those women, the quality they might nor might not possess, do you deem important? 

Greer: Great question! The popular saying is that "Well-behaved women rarely make history," and I think it's true that many of the extraordinary women who inspire us were bold and defiant. But there were also women who obeyed all of society's rules and still made their mark through quiet strength. I think it's important to recognize that range, the wide variety of women who have excelled in all sorts of ways. Spies, pioneers, rulers, nurses, First Ladies -- the roles are endless and so are the women who filled them so memorably.

And of those women, all those extraordinary figures -- Weina, if you could pick one woman from history to put in every high school history textbook, who would it be?

Weina: Ah, I'm going to be selfish-–it will have to be my Empress Wu, who, as a young girl, was forced to serve an emperor in the palace, but she survived the court treachery, beat all her enemies, and rose to become a ruler herself and ruled China for almost fifty years, unchallenged and respected. I can't think of a single American woman who has risen to her level. 

Some readers told me that they usually didn't read books set in China, but they gave my books a chance, and they said they were glad they did. I was happy to hear that, but also a bit sad to hear they didn't often read books set in China. What can we, as writers, do to help readers get out of their comfort zone and pick up books that they usually don't read, Greer? Any suggestions?     

Greer: Ooh, I'm intrigued by the possibilities here. Short of pulling some kind of Inception-style thought experiment and planting the suggestion directly, I think our best bet is to model the behavior. When readers ask me what I'm reading or what I recommend for their book clubs, I generally start by recommending another historical novel written by a woman and centering on a woman's story. Because I know they've read at least one of those, ha. There's nothing wrong with making those suggestions. But I also read a ton of stuff that isn't squarely in my genre, so why not throw one of those in there as well? Author recommendations can hold a lot of weight.

Last question for you, Weina! Do you consider yourself a historian?

I'm laughing – what a great question! Yes, I have a penchant for doing extensive research – I spent six years doing researching for my Empress Wu novels, and I find everything unknown to me fascinating, let it be a tree in my neighborhood, an animal on a mural, a castle in Scotland, a vase in Rome, or a ship in a museum, but I never consider myself to be a historian. To me, to be a historian requires a sort of routine, poring over biographies, reading old manuscripts with a magnifier, or even going to a newly discovered cave and dig into the dirt, all the while wearing the thought of finding the facts of history like a sigil. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, it's just I'm more free-spirited, and I like to invent things a little, to make up things a little, and above all, I confess I enjoy the beauty of prose that uses to describe the facts, the art of telling a story, more than unearthing the history itself. 

What about you, Greer, do you enjoy the history itself as much as the art of storytelling?

Greer: The history is really, really intriguing. But I would be a terrible historian, a terrible non-fiction writer! Because I'm always thinking, Ooh, this is incredibly interesting -- wouldn't it be even more interesting if this other thing were also true? So yes, I love both the discovery of history and the weaving of those facts into some other, not-exactly-true-but-not-quite-false creation. Like my most recent novel Girl in Disguise. There just isn't enough information on Kate Warne in the historical record for us to know exactly what she did as the first woman detective in the US, let alone how she felt about it. So I took history as a jumping-off point. All fiction is a leap, both for writer and reader. And I love that so much.

For more on Weina and her books, check out her website at weinarandel.com.

WomensHistoryReads interview: Devoney Looser

Now here's a fun first for the #WomensHistoryReads Q&Q&Q&A series -- our first newly announced Guggenheim Fellowship recipient! I couldn't be more thrilled to publish this interview with Devoney Looser, author of THE MAKING OF JANE AUSTEN. She's also the first #WomensHistoryReads participant, as far as I know, with a roller derby alter ego (which is, of course, "Stone Cold Jane Austen.") Devoney's passion for her subject and her overall enthusiasm are infectious. Get in on the fun below!

Devoney Looser photo by Alex Chapin ©2017 Arizona Board of Regents

Greer: Tell us about a woman from the past who has inspired your writing.

Devoney: Jane Austen inspires me on a daily basis. Like a lot of Janeites, I discovered Austen’s novels in my teens. In my case, it was my mother who started it. She kept nudging me toward these books. I was resistant, honestly, at first. Austen’s language seemed so impenetrable and stiff. It was maybe the third time that I started Pride and Prejudice that it just clicked somehow, and I was hooked. It became a favorite book. It was only many years later that I learned that my mother had never read it herself. She just knew that Austen was an author you were supposed to read, and she wanted me to get an education. I love that Austen has been be handed-down that way, too—by aspirational word-of-mouth. 

My mother’s persistence worked on me, because I became the first in my family to graduate from college, with an English major. I went on to get my PhD in English directly after that, so I’ve now had several decades to teach British women’s writings, including Austen, to college students. I even ended up meeting my husband over a conversation about Austen. (He’s also an Austen scholar and a professor.) But it was one of my graduate students and a special collections librarian who got me into roller derby. My librarian friend was the one who suggested my derby name, Stone Cold Jane Austen. (I knew who Steve Austin was, because my brother had been a WWE fan growing up.) The nickname “Stone Cold” stuck, and I absolutely love the sport and inhabiting an Austen-inspired alter ego. I played roller derby competitively for five years, and I’m now the faculty adviser to Arizona State University’s roller derby team, the Derby Devils. You never know where Jane Austen is going to take you, right? It’s wild to think that Austen has shaped nearly every part of my adult life—career, marriage, and hobby. That led to my becoming one of the Jane Austen weirdos profiled in Deborah Yaffe’s Among the Janeites (2013), and it led to a research interest in unsung Jane Austen weirdos in decades and centuries past that I wrote about in my book, The Making of Jane Austen (2017).

Greer: What’s your next book about and when will we see it?

Devoney: I’m working on a book about the celebrated sister novelists, Jane and Anna Maria Porter, who were among the first generations of professional women writers and might be thought of as pioneering “career women.” They were contemporaries of Jane Austen’s, but you’ve probably never heard of them. Where Austen was only moderately successful as an author during her lifetime and didn’t publish under her own name, becoming uber-famous after her death, the Misses Porter were once household names. Yet they were gradually forgotten by readers and critics. I want to right the record, to tell their stories, and to describe why I think their lives and writings deserve to be better known. What’s most remarkable about them is not just that they were prolific. (They published dozens of novels between the two of them, several of them bestsellers.) They also wrote thousands of moving letters to each other, describing what it was like to be in the public eye at a time when the public was not exactly kind to women to dared to put themselves forward. Their letters survived but have remained unpublished in archives in the US and UK. I’ve been reading these letters over the past decade, piecing together the sisters' triumphs and struggles. They were the most famous sister novelists before the Brontes, and their lives were also colorful, dramatic, and difficult. (Just one teaser story: Their famous artist-writer-traveler brother married a Russian princess, but it was hardly a fairy-tale ending. The sisters ended up helping to pay off their debts!) 

Greer: What book, movie or TV show would your readers probably be surprised to find out you love?

Devoney: I can quote way too many lines by heart from the movie This is Spinal Tap (1984)—probably about as many as I can quote from Jane Austen novels, embarrassingly. I grew up in Minnesota in the hair-metal era, and so that mock-rockumentary (if you will!) just cracks me up to no end. I also really identify with the world described in Chuck Klosterman’s great book Fargo Rock City. . . . As if that weren’t enough, I absolutely love that there is a Jane Austen and Spinal Tap connection. One of the producers on This is Spinal Tap, Lindsay Doran, went on to produce Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1995). I think this makes *perfect sense,* by the way, especially if you read Jane Austen’s Juvenilia or teenage writings. 

Greer: Great answer!

Devoney: And two questions for you. What drew/draws you to the nineteenth century? Why do you think this is an important period for those of us who are interested in strong women?

Greer: My first historical novel landed me in the late nineteenth century kind of by accident -- the 1880s up through 1900 just happened to be the most plausible period for a female stage magician to make headlines in Vaudeville, which was my inspiration for The Magician's Lie -- but ever since then, I've stayed there on purpose. There are certainly stories of strong woman across the ages, but there's something about that nineteenth-century period, at least the parts of it I'm drawn to, where women are really breaking out of some "ideal woman" trope, and they're not just doing it during wartime, which is traditionally the period that really opens doors for women stepping into male roles. For example, it's not all that shocking to hear that women were spies during the Civil War -- because of course people would do anything for their cause, and of course some of those people were women. But is it more surprising to know that the first woman detective, Kate Warne, was hired by Allan Pinkerton in 1856, well before the war started? It was to me. The courage she must have had to step into that role, to demand a place at the table, is really inspiring. And I've written mostly American history so far. The nineteenth century is a great period in America in particular -- this long rolling wave of expansion, connection, discovery, redefining community. I tend to write about people who are redefining themselves. It was a perfect time to do that in America.

Find out more about Devoney and her books through her website and social accounts:

http://www.devoneylooser.com/

on Twitter @devoneylooser & @StoneColdJane

on Instagram @Devoneylooser; @MakingJaneAusten

#WomensHistoryReads interview: Diane Haeger

The lovely Diane Haeger joins us today for her #WomensHistoryReads interview, and you'll enjoy how she approaches the question of who has inspired her, and why she loves to write fiction about real people. And the last book that blew her away is one of my all-time favorites. Great reading below!

Diane Haeger

Greer: Tell us about a woman from the past who has inspired your writing.

Diane: I have always been a great fan of Edith Wharton. The first time I read The Age of Innocence in high school I was completely bowled over by her powerful prose. For me, she was, and still is, the epitome of a woman writer. Not that I could ever write like her, but I hope that the same strength and commitment shows in my books. That at least has always been the goal.

Greer: What’s the last book that blew you away?

Diane: Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. I loved everything about that novel, so unique and wonderfully written. 

Greer: One of my five favorites of all time. Last question: How would you describe what you write?

Diane: My agent used to call them ‘sexy love affairs from history’ and I think that was true for how I began my career 25 years ago. Now what draws me are stories about misunderstood, or little known, characters from history. They don’t necessarily have to be about a love affair. I’ve always loved the idea of writing about real people because I get to learn so much right along with readers. Also, what they say is so often true, that truth really is stranger than fiction. I love that.

Diane: For you: What is the thing that has surprised you most about this writer’s life as an actual career?

Greer: Two things come to mind, if that's not too much of a cheat! As a career, it blows me away how much it keeps changing. When I first started trying to get published, query letters sent through the mail with self-addressed stamped envelopes were the only way to approach agents. My first agent didn't believe in e-mail. And now there's social media, self-publishing, all these aspects that have revolutionized how writers approach their careers, for better or worse. The other thing is unquestionably positive: what a warm, supportive, enthusiastic community exists among published writers. I have been constantly blown away by how kind everyone has been to me along the way. I do my best to pay it forward to other writers, to build on that community in any way I can.

Find out more about Diane and her books at the links below!

http://www.dianehaeger.com

Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/diane.haeger.5 

Twitter https://twitter.com/Diane_Haeger   

Instagram diane_haeger1

WomensHistoryReads interview: Kris Waldherr

Mixing it up with another delightful installment of #womenshistoryreads that includes both fiction and non-fiction from the same author! You may know Kris Waldherr from her recent book Bad Princess: True Tales from Behind the Tiara, but like so many of us, she writes and reads both fiction and non-fiction as the mood strikes. You'll love her answers below; I sure did.

Kris Waldherr

Greer: What’s the last book that blew you away?

Kris: The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry. I’m reduced to sputtering with admiration whenever I try to describe why I loved this novel. Between Perry’s masterful use of point of view (how’d she do that?!?), the deeply humane and observed characters (Cora Seaborne for the win!), their intricate relationships, and the immersive setting—wow, just wow. Also, as a book designer, The Essex Serpent has one of the most beautiful covers I’ve ever seen.

Greer: I really enjoyed that one too (and yes, the cover is everything.) Now, play matchmaker: what unsung woman from history would you most like to read a book about, and who should write it?

Kris: I’d hardly call her unsung, but I’d love to read a novel about Joan of Arc by Hillary Mantel. Could you imagine Mantel describing the court machinations and sexual politics twining around poor Joan’s neck? Now that’s a book I wish existed!

Greer: Agreed! What’s your next book about and when will we see it?

Kris: My debut novel The Lost History of Dreams comes out from Touchstone Books in Spring 2019. It’s a Victorian era reworking of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice about a post-mortem photographer whose latest assignment forces him to confront his past. Think Wuthering Heights meets The Thirteenth Tale. Though I’ve been published many times before, there’s something special about being a first-time novelist—I’m really excited to see The Lost History of Dreams launched into the world!

Greer: Sounds utterly fabulous!

Kris: My question for you: I was excited to learn Woman Ninety-Nine is set in a nineteenth century asylum. What did you learn while researching asylums that surprised or shocked you the most?

Greer: I kind of suspected this, but it was still jarring to see it borne out by the research: it was very, very easy to commit a woman for insanity against her will in the mid-to-late 1800s. A husband or father could easily and quickly condemn a woman to spend months or even years in an asylum as long as he could get a doctor to sign off on the order, which was not much of a barrier, especially for a man with money. And the reasons women could be committed were very much in line with what we would consider today to be "normal" swings of mood (like postpartum depression) or even positive attributes: wanting an education, refusing to marry someone her family had chosen for her, things like that. When my main character finds herself in an asylum against her will, she also finds that she's more at home among her fellow inmates than she is in the broader society, which tells you something. Asylums weren't always terrible places, even though it was terrible that women could be put there for almost any reason or no reason at all. I really enjoyed exploring that dichotomy -- as I hope my readers will too.

#WomensHistoryReads interview: Stephanie Dray

Stephanie Dray & Laura Kamoie's latest book is out today, and as if that weren't exciting enough -- it's about Eliza Schuyler Hamilton! If you haven't already scooped up a copy of MY DEAR HAMILTON, go ahead, then come back here to read Stephanie's #WomensHistoryReads interview when you're ready.

Okay. Here we go!

Stephanie Dray

Greer: Tell us about a woman (or group of women) from the past who has inspired your writing.

Stephanie: Everybody loves a rebel--a woman who rips up society's rules and sets the world on fire. And I love those ladies too. And yet, I've been drawn again and again to write about historical women who are left to sweep up the ashes and rebuild everything anew. Cleopatra's daughter, Martha "Patsy" Jefferson Randolph and Eliza Schuyler Hamilton are all women who found ways to assert themselves within the system. Women who were left to pick up the pieces after wars, death and destruction. Women who never got enough credit for what they did in the shadows. I think there are a lot more women like that in the past--and the present--than we realize, and their quiet strength, grit, and determination are a true inspiration to me.

Greer: What’s your next book about and when will we see it?

Stephanie: My new novel, co-authored with Laura Kamoie, is MY DEAR HAMILTON: A novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton and I'm so excited about it. It's been a long time in coming--it took us about 18 months to research and edit it--but after seeing the Broadway musical on Hamilton and reading Ron Chernow's excellent biography, we were both eager to know more about Eliza and I think readers will enjoy seeing her take center stage. To my knowledge, ours is the only fiction novel that covers her life before and after Hamilton, and we think that's such an important part of exploring a woman who achieved so much on her own. And it releases today!

Greer: Do you consider yourself a historian?

Stephanie: Oh, this is a fun question that gets bandied about in the historical fiction genre a lot. In my opinion, historians and historical fiction authors have two very different, but overlapping, jobs. Ideally, historians should be relatively even-handed in educating the public about the various possibilities and interpretations of historical people and events. Novelists, by contrast, have to pick a side. They have to not only pick a theory of what happened, but weave a story around that theory as if it were objectively, and not subjectively, true. Thus, even though I do the same research that any historian would do in writing non-fiction, (and sometimes a bit more) my purpose is different. I am a novelist, first and foremost. My duty is to the story and to the reader. Whatever civic duty I owe to history is a matter between me and my own personal mission statement. There are many fine fiction authors who are also trained historians with the degrees to prove it--but just as many who get confused trying to wear both hats and their stories suffer as a result.

Greer: I hear you. The "duty... to the reader" always takes center stage for me. That and a good Author's Note.

Stephanie: My question for you is: What is one thing you wish your fiction-writing colleagues would stop doing?

Greer: There isn't much, but here is my number one, huge, blinking-neon-sign pet peeve: writers who tear down other writers, either individually or by genre. Anyone who says, "Oh, I don't like X genre" in an interview, or implies that one genre is easier or lesser than another -- that really gets my goat. Everything is genre. Yes, including literary fiction. I've been really disappointed when authors whose work I admire are featured, for example, in a "By the Book" feature at a certain major newspaper, and then make some offhand remark like "I don't read romance, of course, it's so predictable" that shows ignorance at best and mean-spiritedness at worst.

Writing, and especially publishing, are hard enough without certain writers using their platform to dismiss other writers out of fear, thoughtlessness, or insecurity. I'm always looking for opportunities to include and build up other writers instead of competing with them. There's room in the tent for all of us -- that's how projects like #womenshistoryreads get started!

Find out more about Stephanie and her books at these links:

Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest | Instagram | LinkedIn | Google+ | Newsletter

WomensHistoryReads: Aimie K. Runyan

I'm pleased to welcome Aimie K. Runyan to the blog today to talk about her inspirations, including the women of New France and Soviet pilots flying in all-female units, as well as when we can expect her next book. Aimie says she "write[s] to celebrate history's unsung heroines," which makes her a perfect interviewee for #WomensHistoryReads! Welcome, Aimie!

Aimie K. Runyan

Greer: Tell us about a woman (or group of women) from the past who has inspired your writing.

Aimie: I began my first novel because of a group of women mentioned very briefly in a Canadian Civ class in grad school. It was a group of 770 women who were sent over under the auspices of Louis XIV to help boost the (very bachelor heavy) population of New France (modern day Quebec). The program was hugely successful, to the point where *two-thirds* of modern-day French Canadian ancestry can trace their lineage back to one or more of these women. I was astounded to learn the impact of this ten-year program, but these women are still dismissed as a footnote in history books. I thought their story deserved to be told, so I did. Since then, I’ve stumbled across numerous other groups of women who were similarly marginalized, so I have plenty of novels left to write, which is both wonderful and saddening.

Greer: How would you describe what you write?

Aimie: I write to celebrate history’s unsung heroines. I strive to be the missing chapters from our history books. When we learn about the World Wars, for example, women are often mentioned in cute little side notes. The women who went to work in factories to keep the country running. Who went back to the kitchen with a smile to make room for the returning war heroes. We don’t hear nearly enough about the women who served in the navy and marines even as early as the First World War. It’s far too comfortable to paint women as having support roles at the times of conflict in our history, and that simply has never been the case.

Greer: What's your next book about and when will we see it?

Aimie: My next book is called GIRLS ON THE LINE, and is the story of the American women who served as telephone operators in the US Army Signal Corps in World War One. The telephone was cutting edge technology at the time, and General Pershing knew that women were needed to run the phone system at maximum efficiency. 250 women served overseas, subject to all military protocols, but were told on return that the government was not going to recognize them veterans. It took a sixty-year legal battle to reverse that decision. It will be available from your favorite book sellers in early November, 2018, just in time for the 100th anniversary of the armistice of WWI.

Aimie: What drove you to focus on historical storytelling, rather than contemporary tales? 

Greer: I mentioned this briefly in a previous interview, but I kind of accidentally ended up writing historical fiction with THE MAGICIAN'S LIE, since I wanted to set it at a time when it was unusual but not impossible for a woman to become famous and notorious as a stage magician. And then I just kept getting more and more ideas for historical novels. Partly because the deeper you get into research for one book, the more you stumble across stories that might inspire another. And I love that books about the past are never really just about the past. We can use these narratives to build resonance with our current world and gain insight into not just how far we've come, but how far we have yet to go.

Read more about Aimie and her books at aimiekrunyan.com.