Dream Not of Other Worlds

     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.