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. 

WomensHistoryReads: Erika Mailman

Yes, that's right! It's not Women's History Month anymore... and #womenshistoryreads is still going strong. How long will the series go? Keep tuning in to find out!

Today's interviewee is Erika Mailman, discussing the inspiration for her novel THE MURDERER'S MAID, whose life she'd like to see Jane Campion take on, and what show she calls "novel writing with fabric." Here's Erika!

Erika Mailman

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

Erika: There are so many ways in which powerful people of the past are remembered. But I like thinking about the people who skirted the edges and didn’t have biographies written about them. For my latest novel, I focused on a woman who—if she had not been hired in a household with a famous double murder—would’ve been a nameless one of the millions of Irish immigrants who came to the U.S. in the 1800s.

Bridget Sullivan sailed to New England in 1886 and moved from state to state for the next few years before coming to work for Andrew and Abby Borden in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1889. Bridget served as the family cook and maid. So many young Irish women with this name served in that capacity that “Bridget” became a noun for a maid. In this time period, the Irish were scorned and thought to be dirty, sickly, verminous, and a drain on public resources.

On August 4, 1892, Bridget was washing the windows when Mrs. Borden was felled by multiple hatchet wounds to the head. The body lay temporarily undiscovered in a second-floor bedroom, and eventually Bridget went to her third floor attic bedroom to take a nap. She awoke to the daughter Lizzie Borden calling her down, because now Mr. Borden had been murdered, too. “Miss Lizzie” went through a media circus of a trial and was acquitted.

Bridget fades from the record, but her time in court was not fully squeezed for the information she surely had about the tensions and resentments in the house. She was discounted because of her immigrant status. In court, she was even openly mocked for her brogue, and the courtroom laughed at her. I loved the opportunity to fill out the spaces of what Bridget might’ve known and not said. Mysteriously, her inquest testimony has disappeared. In court, she contradicted what she’d said at the inquest a year earlier (withdrawing the assertion that Lizzie had been crying the morning of the murders)…who knows what else she retracted or changed her mind about?

My novel also includes a modern-day narrative about a woman who is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant. I wanted to underscore the parallels of how immigrants are treated, then and today.

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

Erika: Maud Gonne, Irish activist and suffragist—and muse to poet William Butler Yeats, who yearned for her and was spurned by her. Rather than a book, I think Jane Campion should write a screenplay about her, because Bright Star was so intensely wonderful and drenched with all the everything, that I know she’d make this story incredible.

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

Erika: I love "Project Runway." People would find it surprising because I’m not a style maven and as a feminist I worry about the unrealistic body types found in the modeling industry (although the last season included plus-sized models, which was fantastic to see). I’m less interested in the modeling side, and more in the design side. What I love about the show is that it follows the process of creation from the first idea, through first draft, through feedback thanks to the eloquent Tim Gunn and revision, and final iteration. It’s like they’re novel writing with fabric!

Greer: Love it! (And love Tim Gunn, especially.)

Erika: Would you say you’re obsessed with the 1800s—if so, why? Do you ever look at daguerreotypes and wish you could go be there with those people for the day?

Greer: Not obsessed, exactly, but yes, I would love to experience the world of my characters directly, knowing it has to be different from ours in countless ways, large and small. Historical fiction is always fascinating to me in the ways it draws parallels between the past and present (like you said above, with the resonance of how immigrants were treated then and now) but there's a lot to be said about both the similarities and differences between our world and theirs. In the area of character, I often focus on the similarities -- even if women didn't have the same rights and privileges, for example, who's to say many of them didn't have the same yearnings we do? But in painting a picture of their world for my readers, how it smells and tastes and looks and feels, I definitely investigate and describe all the differences as much as I'm able. That's what I'd want to go see for myself.

Website: www.erikamailman.com

Blog: http://erikamailman.blogspot.com/

Twitter: @ErikaMailman

WomensHistoryReads interview: Erin Lindsay McCabe

It feels fitting to wrap up the first month of #WomensHistoryReads interviews (that's right, it's not over!) with Erin Lindsay McCabe, one of the first authors I bonded with over our love for telling women's untold stories from history. Erin also hosts the quarterly Twitterchat #HistoricalFix, which is one of my favorite ways to spend time on Twitter. If you love Twitterchats, keep an eye out in April for #WomensHistoryReads to follow in #HistoricalFix's footsteps...

Erin Lindsay McCabe

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

Erin: This is such an impossible question for me, because I really want to answer ALL OF THEM. But because I'm biased, I'm going to say I'd love to see Sarah Rosetta Wakeman in every history book and the reason why is because she -- along with many of the other female Civil War soldiers -- was an ordinary woman who served our country in a way that women were not supposed to, and she served in our military with complete equality. But she did it, not to prove a point or to make history, but because it was something she wanted to do. I would have been so inspired by her story as a kid -- because the way I was taught history pretty much made it seem like hardly any women were ever on the frontlines of any of our country's history, like they weren't taking active roles in shaping our country, and that's just not true. 

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

Erin: What I find most challenging is also what I find most exciting, which is that there is often so little in the historical record about women. I always want my research to be as accurate as possible, so that no one can discount the truth of the story I'm telling just because I got some historical detail wrong. But because women are so often absent from history, it can make hunting down accurate information about their lives incredibly difficult, an idea that Jill Lepore explores really beautifully in her non-fiction book about Jane Franklin, The Book of Ages. Luckly, being a fiction writer, those same gaps -- the questions the historical record will probably never be able to adequately answer --are what spur my imagination and give me the space I need to imagine. But it's also incredibly thrilling when I uncover some little historical tidbit that unlocks a woman's past and places her where I had only imagined she might have been or clarifies what she might have done. 

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

Erin: I would love to read a novel about Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz. In college I read her letters to the bishop who had ordered her books be taken away, and she just astounded me. Her ideas, her passionate argument for women's rights, seemed so modern. I feel like maybe Isabel Allende could get the historical and cultural details right, and that her playfulness could bring Sor Juana's passion and anger at injustice and misuse of power to light in a way that would be deep without being too heavy, that would render Sor Juana in a complex and sympathetic way.

Greer: I'm in.

Erin: And my question for you is: In each of your novels, you've told stories about women who have taken on one form of disguise or another (a magician who deals with illusions in The Magician's Lie, a spy in Girl in Disguise, and a young woman feigning insanity in your forthcoming book Woman Ninety-Nine). What is it you find so compelling about women who take on alternate identities in order to create opportunities for themselves?

Greer: I've always loved the idea of slipping out of your own identity like a dress that doesn't fit you and slipping into a new one instead. I grew up in a very small town, where you pretty much get locked into one identity from the get-go, and it's very difficult to change the perception other people have of you. Once I got to high school, I'd go away for camps or conferences or other activities, and I started meeting other people for the first time and having the chance to build a new perception with them. It blew my mind when I wasn't just seen as "the smart girl" anymore. I actually won a popularity contest at language camp when I was 16 and you could've knocked me over with a feather! That wasn't how I thought of myself at all!

Then I went away to college, all the way from Iowa to Boston, and I rebuilt my identity from scratch again. Five years after that I moved to Washington DC to start graduate school, where I knew no one at all, and the process repeated itself. So I have some experience with the idea that you're only who you say you are, that the choices you make can remake you. And when I do book events I get a taste of what it's like to flip the switch more quickly. I might start out my morning at home, where my three-year-old is in tears complaining that there are "holes in [her] oatmeal" (true story), but by evening I'm in red lipstick and black Gucci boots with 30 people leaning forward in their chairs to hear me speak. It's crazy and I love it.

For more on Erin and her books, visit: 

www.erinlindsaymccabe.com

@ErinLindsMcCabe on Twitter (https://twitter.com/ErinLindsMcCabe)

@ErinLindsMcCabe on Instagram (https://instagram.com/ErinLindsMcCabe)

https://www.facebook.com/ErinLindsayMcCabe

WomensHistoryReads interview: Karen Abbott

30 days of March so far and 30 #WomensHistoryReads interviews! To mark the milestone, I'm sharing the Q&Q&Q&A from one of my favorites, Karen Abbott, author of LIAR TEMPTRESS SOLDIER SPY. (It's nonfiction that reads like a novel -- a really, really good novel.) Truth really is stranger than fiction sometimes, and it's extraordinary when someone undertakes painstaking research into that truth, then arranges it in a compelling narrative that unspools with energy and urgency. That's what Karen Abbott does. You'll love her talent, her books, and her answers below.

Karen Abbott

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

Karen: I’m going to cheat a little bit and name two, but they worked so closely together that it would be unfair to choose just one: Elizabeth Van Lew and Mary Bowser, who are two main characters in LIAR TEMPTRESS SOLDIER SPY. Elizabeth was a Richmond-born society matron who sympathized with the North, which was a very dangerous position for her to have while living in the Confederate capital. Mary was born a slave to the Van Lew family; when she was about four years old, Elizabeth freed her (along with all of the family slaves). She sent Mary abroad for schooling and developed a sort of mother-daughter relationship with her. With the onset of the Civil War, Elizabeth concocted a scheme: she would get Mary a job as a servant at the Confederate White House, waiting on Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his family. Bowser pretended she couldn’t read or write, but in reality she was highly educated and gifted with a photographic memory.

So when she was dusting Davis’s desk or cleaning up the children’s nursery, she was also sneaking a peek at military papers and eavesdropping on confidential conversations. She passed all of the information back to Elizabeth, who had organized a Union spy ring that stretched into neighboring states. The “Richmond Underground,” as it was called, was responsible for passing the most important intelligence of the war to Union General Ulysses S. Grant (in a letter to Elizabeth, he said so himself). The North would not have won the war without the efforts of Elizabeth Van Lew and Mary Bowser. They should be household names on the same level of Grant, Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson, and I think it’s a travesty that they have mostly been lost to history. 

Greer: It's really a spectacular story, and I totally agree with your choice(s). Generals aren't the only people who make things happen in wartime -- far from it. So, what's your next book about and when will we see it?

Karen: My next book is about the most successful bootlegger in American history (and his name was NOT Al Capone). He was wildly innovative, eccentric and brilliant, and made an estimated $40 million (in today’s money) in just two short years. He threw lavish parties and was reportedly Fitzgerald’s inspiration for Jay Gatsby. My other main character is a pioneering woman lawyer, who, at age 32, was appointed by Warren Harding at the Assistant Attorney General for the United States. She was in charge of all bootlegging cases in the country. Harding, whose administration was notoriously corrupt, figured that a young woman just five years out of law school with no prosecutorial experience would not impede their business with bootleggers. Well, of course she went in there and started kicking some ass. There’s a great narrative arc: a sordid love triangle, a murder, a sensational trial, all set against the backdrop of the Jazz Age. I’m having a lot of fun with it, and don’t want it to end! The tentative publishing date is January 2020, timed for the 100th anniversary of Prohibition. I envision quite a few events in speakeasies…. 

Greer: I like how you think. Last question: Do you consider yourself a historian?

Karen: Not in the traditional sense of the word, no. I don’t have a history degree and I am not an academic; I have no interest in writing, say, a feminist analysis of prostitution or the Civil War. I’m a selective historian; I find a story that fascinates me and then I exhaustively educate myself about that topic, those people, that place and time. I notice language in letters. I discover what items were selling at the corner store and for how much. I research the proper way to lace a corset—those sorts of details that bring long-dead tales and people to live. I like to say I’m in the business of time travel, and I aim to tell a good story that illuminates a forgotten slice of history. By the end of a book, I am always jealous of my characters, and wish I could have lived their lives. Writing about them is the next best thing. 

Greer: Love it.

Karen: Your most recent (and excellent novel), GIRL IN DISGUISE, is based on the true story of Kate Warne, America’s first female private eye. I came across Kate Warne in my research for LIAR TEMPTRESS SOLDIER SPY and was fascinated by her, so I am glad you wrote this book. I’m curious about your research process. I don’t believe there is much information about Kate, and certainly not much primary source material. Did you find anything surprising that shed light on her character, or is she mostly a figment of your imagination? Did you rely on diaries and other primary source material to make the dialogue so authentic and true? What is your secret trick for turning an obscure historical figure into such a complex, three-dimensonal and relatable character?

Greer: As it happens, I didn't really know there was so little information on Kate in the historical record when I decided to write a book about her. Lucky for me I'm not a biographer. I would have really been up a creek. But as a historical novelist I decided to take the gaps in her story as invitations. We don't have any letters or diaries from her, so I had to come up with a voice for her, and I gave her the personality I thought she must have had in order to do the things she did: march into Allan Pinkerton's office in 1856 asking for a job as a detective; be so good at her job Pinkerton established a Bureau of Female Detectives and put her in charge; help talk Abraham Lincoln into changing his route to DC for his inauguration to avoid an assassination attempt in Baltimore. And that's just what we know she did. Imagine all the other things we don't know about!

Nearly everything in Kate's character uses that scarce information from the historical record as a jumping-off point. We know she was a good enough actress and mimic to pass as a native Alabaman with other Southerners -- how did that come about, I wondered? We know she was a widow, or at least Allan Pinkerton says she was a widow, so I added that to the list of things to explain. Bit by bit I built a character from what little information the record offered up, and wove together plausible -- and hopefully interesting -- ways to fill in the gaps. The result isn't necessarily the Kate Warne, but she's my Kate Warne, which is the freedom inherent in fiction. I just want to honor history and deliver the best possible experience for the reader, whatever that takes.

For more:

https://karenabbott.net/

https://twitter.com/KarenAbbott

https://www.instagram.com/karen_abbott/