The gorgeous cover to the right of this text belongs to Elizabeth Loupas’s The Second Duchess, a historical novel inspired by Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” Since Elizabeth’s book will hit shelves on March 1, I asked her if she’d mind writing up some thoughts about her writing and research process, and about fictionalizing real (and already fictionalized) events.

Elizabeth:

First I’d like to thank Katharine for inviting me to write a bit about the intersection between “My Last Duchess” and The Second Duchess, and how researching and writing the book changed my reading of the poem. Thank you, Katharine, and congratulations on the paperback release of your own beautiful, beautiful Alcestis.

I have loved “My Last Duchess” from the time I first read it in junior high. For junior-high-me, it had everything—the glamour of the Renaissance, a darkly brooding narrator, a beautiful and doomed heroine. At first I saw only the surface romance of it. Later, in university classes, I read it more carefully and followed the traditional interpretation—the duke as a madman who murdered his innocent wife out of pride and jealousy and sheer possessiveness. My focus was always on the duke and the duchess and I never really thought about the unseen character of the potential second wife.

Much later, when I was tutoring high school students through writing essays about the poem, it suddenly struck me that there was yet another level to the poem’s story. Who was this second wife? What would she make of her new husband? At that time I did not know any of the historical background, or even that Browning had based the poem on fictionalized versions of historical personages.

So I began to look things up—research! How I love it—and a whole new world opened up to me. The poem’s duke, Alfonso II d’Este, became less a one-note megalomaniacal villain and more a classic Renaissance prince in the mode of Machiavelli. His first duchess, Lucrezia de’ Medici, became less the innocent victim and more a willful seventeen-year-old. (She was only fourteen when she and Duke Alfonso were married, and seventeen when she died.) The duke’s second wife, Barbara of Austria, took on a face and a personality of her own as well—she was twenty-six, old for a first marriage at that time, and ambassadors’ letters are frank about her lack of beauty.

Browning chose one way to fictionalize the relationships of these three people—a way, I think, that reflects his own Victorian sensibilities, his admiration of the Romantics and Pre-Raphaelites, and his taste for psychological drama. I wanted to choose a different way. I did. The Second Duchess is the result.

So for me now, there are two ways to read “My Last Duchess.” One is the way Browning intended, and which a million students and critics have expounded—that the duke is a madman and that he had his first duchess murdered. When asked what his meaning was, Browning himself said, “I meant that the commands were that she should be put to death, or he might have had her shut up in a convent.” So this is Browning’s story, and he’s sticking to it. There’s something to be said for it—it’s compelling drama.

The other way to read the poem is with the genuine historical personages in mind. Duke Alfonso was a soldier, a sportsman, a musician. He fought in the French army with his cousin Henri II of France. He was a world-class tennis player—the first written book of rules for tennis is dedicated to him. He was the patron of the first professional female singers in Europe, the Consort of Ladies. So although he was indeed vain, arrogant, and vengeful, he was a sixteenth-century prince and that was what was expected of him.

Young Duchess Lucrezia, so often characterized as an innocent victim of the Duke’s jealousy and madness, was the daughter of Cosimo I de’ Medici; she and her sisters were not as sheltered as one might think. (Read the fascinating story of Lucrezia’s older sister Isabella in Caroline P. Murphy’s Murder of a Medici Princess. Isabella plays a critical role in my Lucrezia’s development, and she’s far from innocent.) Even Browning hints at the duchess having a mind of her own: “…and if she let / Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set / Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse…”

It changes everything. I think it makes the poem richer. Browning’s fictionalization, and a re-fictionalization based on the historical record, intertwine with each other for me now as I read, and make my experience of the poem all the more intricate and powerful.

(The Second Duchess, published by Penguin/NAL, will be released March 1, 2011. For complete details see www.elizabethloupas.com. Thanks, Elizabeth, for writing about it here!)

That was a busy week! Two cross-half-the-country trips, both overnight, and I somehow managed to avoid the worst snarls of weather-related travel drama. But I’m very glad to be back in Austin, where it’s supposed to hit 70 this weekend. Texas, sometimes I love you a lot.

I keep tagging things to post here and didn’t even have the time to start a post until Wednesday — when I once again had to get the site taken down to address another security issue. Sigh. And once again, all is now fixed and fine. But I do wish whatever opportunistic bot has grown fond of my site would leave it alone.

Here are some of the things I’ve been wanting to link:

• Anne Sexton reading her poetry and being precisely as magnetic and dramatic as you’d imagine.
• On the topic of women writers, VIDA’s incredibly disheartening charts comparing the presence of women writers in popular print outlets to their presence as reviewers, etc.
• Contact your members of Congress and urge them to support the National Endowment for the Humanities (and NPR, and Planned Parenthood, while you’re at it).
• The text of Much Ado About Nothing, because something made me think of it while I was writing Killingly the other day. (The scene with Beatrice refusing Count Pedro, specifically.)
• Rice will be hosting THATCamp Texas in April.
• Are you female and anemic, and have you been told that you’re anemic because you’re female? Here’s an instructive study in how gendering health problems isn’t always a great idea.
• Francis Ford Coppola talks about being a director, creativity, and confidence.
• The Stanford Literary Lab publishes a report on studying computer analysis of genre; unsurprisingly, it’s complicated: “You take David Copperfield, run it through a program without any human input – ‘unsupervised’, as the expression goes – and … can the program figure out whether it’s a gothic novel or a Bildungsroman? The answer is, fundamentally, Yes: but a Yes with so many complications that it is necessary to look at the entire process of our study. These are new methods we are using, and with new methods the process is almost as important as the results.”

The other thing that’s been holding my attention this week while I should be working on more diss revisions is the uprising in Egypt. I’ve been to Egypt once, in the summer of 2000, just after my first year of college. The tourism industry there was still reeling from the attacks on tourists in the 1990s, and of course it would grow even worse after 2001. My experience of the country was entirely a tourist’s experience and fraught with all the troubling dynamics that accompany American tourism, plus a few extra twists to those dynamics introduced by the fact that I was blonde, barely eighteen, not a speaker of Arabic, and traveling with my parents. And it was also amazing, for all the reasons you’d expect given my history geekiness — the river, the temples, the star-painted ceilings, the Hellenistic-era graffiti, the little round bellies on the relief sculptures. The National Museum, which people on the street linked arms to protect after looting during the protests this week, just as they did the Library of Alexandria.

I remember our female Coptic Christian guide in Cairo — every time violence against the Copts is in the news I think about her — and the young man who guided our group on the Nile. I’ve been hoping that they’re safe. Now I also hope that they’re exhilarated. I’m so glad Mubarak has finally stepped down and has ceded power to the military, who seem, at least, to be more open to the people’s demands than he ever was. And I wish every bit of good luck in the universe to the Egyptians and their hard-won democracy.

The problem with having two computers you use regularly is that you end up with loads of tabs open in one browser, things you mean to post links to — and then you (or at least I) switch to the other computer for a week and forget about them. I have an Ubuntu desktop machine and a Macbook Pro; I do most of my dissertation work on the desktop because the screen is bigger, and most of my fiction writing these days on the Macbook, because I’ve been using Scrivener for Killingly. (I love Scrivener, by the way. I usually write in order, but Killingly is challenging that habit a bit, since I keep realizing I need to go back and add a scene, etc. The corkboard/notecard system is perfect for keeping track of what I’m doing.)

Anyway, there were a few things I’d intended to include in my link roundup post this weekend that were lurking on my laptop. The first is this response by David Simon to criticism from the current Baltimore police commissioner about the effect of The Wire on the city. Makes an interesting comparison with this article about Portugal’s decriminalization of drug possession. (As the person who posted the Portugal link on Twitter said, “Portugal is Hamsterdam.”) I don’t buy the argument that the commissioner is making, either — the notion that a fictionalized portrayal of real problems in a city somehow harms the city more than the actual problems do. Or that fictionalizing real life makes the fictionalized version untrustworthy, as if the only thing art were good for was creating documentation.

And speaking of complicated things, I’ve been meaning to link to this post about ebook piracy, by a writer who grew up in Malaysia and has been living in the UK recently. But I’m glad I hadn’t yet, because Karen Healey, who was involved in the original Twitter discussion (? maybe not quite the right word) about pirating ebooks, has also made a sensible and apologetic post owning up to the fact that she hadn’t really considered the points brought up in Zen’s post, or in colorblue’s post, which focuses on (in colorblue’s words) “the underlying hierarchies & inequalities in the both the current concept of IPR and the ways that it is used and enforced.” Seriously, read all of these. For a number of reasons, including the fact that I taught Lessig’s Free Culture a few years ago, I’m not ever likely to go off on Twitter about how kids on BitTorrent are ruining my career — though it’s entirely possible that that would change if I were trying to make a living solely off my writing, or if I were in striking distance of a bestseller list, which I am totally not. But I can’t say I had considered the points made in these posts as fully as I should have either. The conversation authors often have on the internet about intellectual property rights and piracy is lamentably American-centric, but it doesn’t have to be.

Here’s a Christmas gift: this post, by the delightful Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown (recently the organizer of #mooreandme), which explains why and how Sei Shonagon‘s Pillow Book should seem familiar to contemporary readers:

But the book, despite being written from and about a way of life that ended centuries ago, reads as nigh-freakishly contemporary. In point of fact, it is not just contemporary, but (she said, causing every Japanese classical scholar in the entire world to simultaneously have an aneurysm and die, due to her massive lack of scholarship) bloggy. Reading Sei Shonagon is almost exactly like reading a thousand-year-old Tumblr. It’s about everything, it’s about nothing; it’s deeply boring, it’s riveting; it’s shapeless, it is its own shape; it’s catty, touching, lyrical, banal, witty, self-absorbed, indiscreet, pensive, gossipy, introspective, everything, held together only by the force of Sei Shonagon’s personality.

Dear Lord, Sei Shonagon’s personality. One does not get introduced to it; one ENCOUNTERS it, and hopes the experience leaves no lasting scars. Ivan Morris, the translator of the version I own, sums her up as follows: “A complicated, intelligent, well-informed woman who was quick, impatient, keenly observant of detail, high-spirited, witty, emulative, sensitive to the charms and beauties of the world and to the pathos of things, yet intolerant and callous about people whom she regarded as her social or intellectual inferiors.” Now, there are two things to notice about this passage: First, that Ivan Morris is not so great at summing up (those are a lot of adjectives, Ivan!) and second, that it is absurdly reverent and polite. In fact, Sei Shonagon was not “impatient” or “intolerant” or anything so socially acceptable as those adjectives would imply: Girlfriend was, in a word, fucking mean. She hated children, poor people, ugly people, people in bad outfits, people with an inadequate number of servants, their servants, her servants, servants in general, and everyone else in Japan who had the misfortune to be less intelligent, well-connected, and sophisticated than Sei Shonagon — which, in her view, was everyone, with a few necessary exceptions being made for the Royal Family. She really did love the Royal Family, however!

Shonagon was both bloggy and poetic. Her longer prose entries can be striking and evocative, but her lists do something else, something finer and more unique, something that reminds me of modernist poetry. (The slippery prose-poetry nature of her work seems to be catching if you only borrow her style, too; I wrote something I thought was a piece of flash fiction, after Shonagon, and LCRW published it as a poem.) Maybe the most tumblr-ish of all are the pieces that aren’t quite prose scenes or lists, just opinions, boldly stated. For example:

19. Oxen Should Have Very Small Foreheads

Oxen should have very small foreheads with white hair; their underbellies, the ends of their legs, and the tips of their tails should also be white.

I like horses to be chestnut, piebald, dapple-grey, or black road, with white patches near their shoulders and feet; I also like horses with light chestnut coats and extremely white manes and tails — so white, indeed, that their hair looks like mulberry threads.

I like a cat whose back is black and all the rest white.

[The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, transl. and ed. Ivan Morris, 52]

Why should oxen have very small foreheads? They simply should, and Shonagon will tell you about it if you let her. And you should.

This is probably the second least holiday-ish holiday season I’ve had — I have no courses or teaching to take a break from, end-stage dissertations do not give you downtime unless you force them to, and for various family reasons I won’t be traveling. But that doesn’t mean I’m not still enjoying choosing gifts for people, and reading gift guides, like the ones I linked in my previous posts.

So! Here are a small number of books and other things I’d recommend if you’re still searching for last-minute presents:

• A Very Short Introduction to Biography, Hermione Lee. A nicely sized survey of the history of the genre. I’d probably use this as a text if I ever get to teach one of the classes on biography that I’ve designed syllabi for, and not just because it’s full of useful information — it’s also an enjoyable read.
• Georgette Heyer’s Regency World, Jennifer Kloester — for friends of yours who really want to know all the workings of the ton. (And I’m going to stop there with books or I’ll be adding to this entry all day.*)
• Qwirkle, a game marketed for children but hilarious when played by grown-up humanists. You want the cubes, not the tiles.
• Robyn’s Body Talk Pt. 1 and Janelle Monae’s The ArchAndroid, for people who need some good pop music.
• Small batch jams from Confituras, a local Austin business. (I believe all their offerings are gluten free.) They wouldn’t arrive in time for Christmas, by now, but would make a nice present later too.
• Pears from Harry & David. These are grown near where my mother lives in southern Oregon — we drive by their orchards on I-5. They’re actually kind of worth it as a splurge.

Plus a few links before I retreat back to the land of dissertation and other grad-school-related stress:

• An article title I could’ve written myself: Your Attacks on Genre Fiction Grow Tiresome.
• Lit Folks Are Hip. The captions say so.
• Sara Ryan’s interview with Jenny Davidson — I’m saving this till after I’ve read The Explosionist, but I’m actually also using one of Davidson’s academic books for diss research right now, so I was happy to see this, which focuses on her fiction.
• The Lapham Quarterly‘s fascinating piece on the dwindling and disappearance of Barbara Follett, child prodigy of letters.
• A Roman-era statue emerges from the sea on Israel’s coast.
• The Google Labs ngram viewer, if you haven’t played with it yet. There are apparently some questions about the reliability of its dating metadata, but it’s still a nice hint of the ways large-scale research in the humanities can evolve from here.

* You could also, if you were so inclined, pre-order the Alcestis paperback for someone you love! It’s out February 1 but will probably ship early from Amazon (the hardback sure did), and of course the e-book version (Kindle, Sony Reader) gets delivered instantly.

The Lambda Literary Foundation blog is also featuring a series of specialized LGBTQ gift guides, including a list “for your bisexual best friend” that features Alcestis. Here’s the guide in its entirety, with more than 75 books listed.

If you aren’t a supporter of Lambda Literary, now is an excellent time to join up and show some end-of-the-year love.

This is possibly the best thing I’ve found on the internet lately, and I’m not even saying that because Alcestis is included in it: the Hipster Book Club’s holiday gift guide. Ten pages of quirky, funny book recommendations, with categories from “Geek Love” to “Ladies’ Choice” to “General Fiction.” If you want to buy books for people this holiday season but you haven’t been satisfied by the best of lists at the Times and etc., go here. You will find things to give, and you will also add many things to your own to-be-read list.

In other book news, Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden has been adapted for the screen — this interview with the screenwriter dances delicately around the question of how to adapt the work’s sex scenes, and in fact the whole relationship between the main character and his wife, given what it has been taken to suggest about Hemingway’s own relationships with women.

Speaking of adaptation: I’m not even much of a Sherlock fan, and Graham Moore’s The Sherlockian sounds like great fun.

And finally, if you need something pretty to look at, here’s the trailer for Terrence Malick’s next movie, The Tree of Life. It looks… exactly like a Terrence Malick movie. Which is more than I can say for most films.

A quick post tonight to mention the Best LGBT Books of 2010 list posted this week at the Band of Thebes blog. I contributed a recommendation, as did 79 other writers — including Lillian Faderman, whose recommendation is exactly what I almost submitted! (She nominated The Little Stranger, which, while not explicitly a lesbian book, certainly read as queer to me too.) My choice was Emma Donoghue’s lovely Inseparable. But do go and read the whole list. It’s added many things to my mental TBR pile.

And speaking of Emma Donoghue, here’s a great review of Room, if you haven’t read it yet. I think it was probably my favorite book of the year, period.

A number of the It Gets Better videos have made me teary. But what I like most about this one is the sheer number of faces you get to see — all of them sharing their happiness and their healing.

An early happy Thanksgiving to you, Americans, and happy day, everyone else.

Bliss: not having a headache after days of lingering migraine. Of course, I made up for it by taking a fierce tumble while I was out running on an especially rocky trail this morning and whacking the hell out of my knee. I don’t even know what I tripped on. Sigh.

While I’m sitting on the sofa with an ice pack, here are some links:

A lengthy and fascinating interview with Cynthia Ozick at the Paris Review, in which Ozick typed her responses to the interviewer’s spoken questions. And here’s the Times review of Ozick’s new novel Foreign Bodies, a reworking of The Ambassadors. I really want to read this!

Maud Newton’s grandmother’s recipe to make you “the skinniest, shittiest, sexiest, drunkest, bastard in town.” In 30 days. In case you’re on a deadline or something.

Rachel Manija Brown on “what freeze/fight/flight” has felt like for her, as a resource for writers.

A forthcoming collection of essays about alternative academic careers in the humanities, to be published online and freely available. (Can anyone tell me why people use “#alt-ac” as the alternate academic tag even though Twitter doesn’t recognize hyphenated hashtags? Is there something wrong with “#altac,” or even “#alt_ac”?)