​“The Past is a Foreign Country”
     I’ve been listening to a podcast about time and how impossible it is to define time, but also how time is a dimension unlike space because time always moves forward.  Physicists speak of the “arrow of time,” always moving toward more chaos. On a personal level, we cannot go back in time no matter how much we desire to.  This presents a quandary for the writer of historical fiction.  She wishes to return to or visit the past in order to learn more about it.  She tries to build a plausible past world, even though history itself is not something she can take down from the shelf and examine.  According to historian Hayden White, history too is fictionalized depending on who wrote the history, and the historian “creates” history rather than reflecting “reality.”

     Perhaps the only way to think logically about the past is to consider it a “foreign country where people do things differently,” as L.P. Hartley claims in his 1953 novel, The Go-Between.  As a writer, it is impossible for me to know the past with certainty.  It’s like visiting a foreign country where I am ignorant of the language and how people understand the world.  Did the people in the time period I write about believe in a heliocentric universe?  Did they believe Bishop Ussher’s calculation that claimed the Earth was created in 4004 B.C.?  Did they have the privilege of education?  Were they literate? Did they travel farther than the nearest town? Were they allowed to/have time to exercise creativity?  Did they long for a different reality than the one they lived in?  The best I can do as I construct their worldview and their “reality” is to conduct thorough research, while realizing that historians and biographers too can’t visit the past to verify what they assume is true.  All they can do is examine the artifacts, the primary documents, and then extrapolate as they construct their version of the past, their foreign country.

​     As a writer of historical fiction, who often skews the past by creating different events that could have plausibly happened, I do what I can to know this foreign country.  I try to learn its language; I try to be aware of its customs, mores, and personal, social, and political conflicts. Even so, this foreign country is more like a different planet, where I, like the 1950s cartoon characters Mr. Peabody and Sherman, time travel to connect with other human beings whose worldviews may have been radically different from mine or not.  The hope for me, as a writer of alternate history, is that I can help my readers learn the languages, customs, and mores, and understand the conflicts of that foreign country, with the aim of making us feel a greater affinity for those who traveled these strange roads before us.

     In Paradise Lost, Raphael instructs Eve and Adam to “dream not of other worlds,” an admonition that suggests that God would be displeased if either of them exercised their imaginations.  In this context, humans should merely accept their limitations and the world that they inhabit. They should not hope for a better, more just, or fairer world.  They should fear their imaginations because their imaginations might lead them wrongly and away from their Creator, who appears in this scenario to be the only being allowed to create.

     In my historical fiction, I create characters who dream of other worlds.  Characters who dream of other worlds attempt to transform their own world. In Vindicated, I write about Mary Shelley, who imagines a world where there is no death, a world where a composite “Superman” might overcome human limitations.  In The Rossetti Diaries, Victorian poet-artist-model Elizabeth Siddal envisions and fashions another world where her Lady of Shalott does not long for Lancelot but for Guinevere, and who in her own life wishes to be the painter rather than the painted.  The novel also focuses on the poet Christina Rossetti who creates her own world where goblin men do not overcome young women and where she can be part of a Sisterhood of female artists. Together Christina and Lizzie found a new world, a women’s artistic utopia.  In this world, Christina and Lizzie can love one another while crafting art in a place where men can’t tell them they haven’t the talent or that they should not draw, paint, or write because they might go mad from doing so. In my Work-In-Progress, A Woman Outside of History, I write about the nineteenth-century Irish heroine Anne Devlin, who worked toward a fairer and more just world, where Ireland would be independent of England, where Catholics would not be deprived of civil rights, and where the Irish parliament would be restored. The novel also centers on Percy and Harriet Shelley, who genuinely believed that they might end British tyranny and that they could create an artistic utopian community that would be a model for the rest of the world.

​     Why do I write about these historical figures and why do I imagine them dreaming of other worlds?  To put it simply, I believe that the novel, in its best and purest form, is concerned with reforming the world.  While some of what I write involves dark scenes of imprisonment, abuse, grief, and harrowing violence, in the end, each character’s arc leads to satisfaction or triumph.  And along the way, the characters teach the reader how to overcome adversity, which is a lesson that all of us should learn when we too are told to dream not of other worlds.

Some claim that to become a worthy writer, you have to be an avid reader.  Of course, not all readers enjoy writing, but my journey to become a writer began with becoming an enthusiastic reader when I was a child.  With that said, I never set out to become a writer, but I easily became enthralled by words and narrative, by the story that imaginatively transports us to unfamiliar but captivating worlds.

Looking back, I recall three pivotal moments that led to my fascination with words and story.  The first involved poetry. When I was a grade-school child, I was lucky enough to live next door to a woman who became my surrogate mother.  Her name was Marie McGeorge Davis, and she was a 1933 graduate of Wellesley College. Until that time, I had never known anyone who was a college graduate.  My parents were both hard-scrabble adults; one the orphaned daughter of Eastern European immigrants, the other abandoned as a child who nevertheless became a resilient self-made man.  Neither had a substantive education.  So, Marie Davis, later known as Mama Davis, befriended me and led me into the literary world by reading poetry to me.  She’d invite me over for tea and then she would read from her copy of 101 Famous Poems, a volume of which she gave me for my First Communion in 1961.  One time, she read Poe’s “The Bells” with great dramatic flair, and I was completely mesmerized by the words and the ways in which the language mimicked the ringing of bells. I knew then that I wanted to be like Mama Davis who also loved words and the way they were combined to enchant the reader.

The next pivotal moment was also engendered by a neighbor, an older girl named Susie, who lent me her copy of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden.  Up until that time, probably around fourth grade, I’d read and re-read my children’s poetry books my real mother bought me, filled with colorful illustrations of fairies under toadstools and flying away on the backs of dragon flies, but I also read in school tiny stories that we read silently at our own pace.  I liked reading and setting my own goals and I quickly moved from one unit to another.  I might have also read Winnie the Pooh or other children’s books, but I don’t really recall.  But I do remember The Secret Garden and its atmospheric suspense and the need to uncover the mystery at Misslethwaite Manor.  The petulant, spoiled, orphaned Mary Lennox, who arrived in England from India meeting the crippled child Colin. The antics of the “common” and adventurous boy Dickon. And I especially remember the setting of late-nineteenth-century England (which I’m sure eventually led me to be the Anglophile that I became).  This was definitely an unfamiliar world, but I wanted to enter that secret garden and be changed by it in the way that Mary Lennox was.

The third moment in my transformation into becoming a reader was buying a book at our annual book fair at my Catholic school.  The cafeteria tables had been regrouped and turned into book display tables and all of the books were colorful and beautiful hardbacks standing tall on book pedestals.  Copies of children’s illustrated classics, like Treasure Island, Black Beauty, and Grimm’s Fairytales sat proudly on the tables waiting to be picked up and perused. But my attention was riveted on Little Women about which I knew nothing, but I liked the title because I’m sure I was interested in some day growing up and becoming a woman and I thought that this book might teach me how. 

At any rate, I ordered my copy and eagerly and impatiently waited the many weeks before I received it and then as soon as I opened the package, I took my book to my room, shut the door, and entered the land of Little Women, the world of sisters and compassionate Marmie surviving during the tumultuous and terrifying Civil War. Little did I know that one of the characters would become a role model for me and other girls (in fact, in my grad school feminist theory course, the majority of us most admired this character) – Jo March was the little woman who was most the attractive, for Jo jumped fences and didn’t want to marry her neighbor Laurie; she wanted to be a writer.

Reading Alcott’s novel in fifth grade eventually led me in junior high and beyond to other notable characters, female and male: Jane Eyre, Cathy Earnshaw, Dorothea Brooke, Anna Karenina, Heathcliff, Oliver Twist, Don Quixote, Jean Valjean, and many other complex characters and narratives. In retrospect, I’m grateful to Marie Davis, Susie, and the good sisters of my Catholic school who valued reading and made it possible for their students to become enthralled by words and narrative, and characters who demonstrated the many ways to become a woman (or a man) and more importantly imperfect human beings with complex and conflicting desires and goals.
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How did you become an eager reader?   Which moments stand out in your childhood?

As a writer-scholar, who used to be a scholar-writer (there is a difference), I’ve long admired Antonia Susan Byatt, the author of innumerable works, including the Booker-Prize Winning novel Possession, but also Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge In Their Time, what the Sunday Times calls “a subtle and scholarly work.” Her work fascinates me.  It’s both erudite and accessible, especially if you’re an avid reader who enjoys literary allusions.  Her brilliance is sometimes on the level of a Victorian realist writer like George Eliot, who, despite claiming she was not a storyteller, was able to convey the intricacies and foibles of humans, while also poking fun at our human condition.  But Byatt is also able to write contemporary fairy tales that read like originals and write poetry as if she were a Victorian poet or Scheherazade-like fantasies about a sexy djinn who loves an aging female scholar.  But that’s just her fiction.  Her scholarly writing doesn’t read like scholarship at all.  It doesn’t obfuscate or practice “dissertationeese”; it’s eloquent, knowledgeable, and illuminating.

Having said that I admire Byatt’s work, I confess that I fail to be her.  I lack her brilliance and her subtlety.  I can’t write Victorian poetry and try as I might I have yet to write a satisfying fairy tale and no djinn has granted me three wishes to enhance my writing.  Even so, my scholarship has been deemed readable and accessible, erudite even and for that I’m grateful.  Yet it’s the scholarship, where I’ve most succeeded as a writer, that I’ve abandoned or, at least moved on from.  But it’s the scholarship that has led recently to my fiction-writing and so, in a sense, I’ve modeled myself after Byatt who also turned from scholarship to creative writing.

Sixteen years my senior, Byatt studied at Cambridge and taught at University College London for over a decade before she became a novelist.  Likewise, I spent many years teaching at a university (albeit a Midwestern American one) before I returned to my fledgling creative writing, something that I practiced while in graduate school. 
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Although I greatly enjoyed writing the scholarly books and articles that I wrote over a thirty-year career, works that allowed me to argue a point of view based on extensive research, such writing did not allow me, as Raphael says in Paradise Lost, to “dream of other worlds.” Fiction does allow me to dream.  It allows me to think of what the 18th-Century British feminist and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft and her husband, the political philosopher William Godwin might have been thinking as Mary lay dying, as I did in my first historical fiction novel, VINDICATED: A NOVEL OF MARY SHELLEY. Or to wonder whether Christina Rossetti’s erotic poem, “Goblin Market,” is about her sister-in-law Lizzie Siddal, the painter-poet-model, as I do in my forthcoming novel, THE ROSSETTI DIARIES. Or to write in the voice of a lonely, mentally addled frequenter of strangers’ funerals, as I do in my short story “Birdie” or to write a novel that juxtaposes Percy Shelley’s idealistic politics with the sufferings of an Irish heroine, as I do in my novel-in-progress, NO COWARD’S SOUL HAVE I.  Fiction allows me to exercise imagination and not merely write about the work of other writers, even though writing about the work of other writers, like Byatt, greatly benefited me intellectually and creatively, for in writing about her work, my own imagination was piqued.

So, even though I tried and failed to be as brilliant and accessible as A.S. Byatt, I’m grateful for the ways in which she taught me to try to emulate her and other literary icons. I’ll continue to try, and I’ll continue to fail.

In this blog, I’ll write more about the writers who inspire me to try to become a writer.  I’ll also attempt to inspire you to tell your own stories, for we all have a story to tell, even if we invent other characters to convey our inner worlds.