Today, at least, I’m writing about Boston in the 1890s through the eyes of a retired Congregationalist pastor who is about to have a nervous breakdown of sorts (or possibly a stroke, I haven’t decided yet). Here’s part of what he sees:

That print was produced only three years before this character visited Boston to investigate a report that a girl with a name similar to his missing daughter had appeared in the City Hospital. Pemberton Square, where the Boston police station was located in 1897, is close to Scollay Square — if I’m reading this map correctly, he would certainly have traveled down Court Street on his way to the station. He would have seen the recently constructed Ames Building; he might have passed Faneuil Hall.

In order to write this man, I’ve been reading things like the delightfully titled Congregationalism: what it is; whence it is; how it works; why it is better than any other form of church government; and its consequent demands. I’ve also been reading for fun. It’s bizarre and wonderful to have a stretch of time to myself without the immediate pressure of an academic deadline, even a distant one. I am preparing for my dissertation defense, and will be dipping back into that work for the next few weeks. But I’ve had time to browse the recently published books section at the UT library, the one with two-week checkouts. I can’t remember the last time I was able to do that and actually finish a book in time to return it. I’ve been reading short story collections, thinking about teaching next fall.

I’ve also been playing with TimeGlider, a tool for producing timelines — I need it to keep straight all the details from the newspaper clippings about the events in Killingly! So far, it’s working pretty well. Assuming Killingly appears in print someday, I’ll probably make the timeline public and link it here. Though I may take out some of my notes to myself — you know, the ones that say FIX THIS, WTF, etc. Writing a multi-POV, not-strictly-chronological novel based on a complex set of messily-reported real-life events is a sticky business.

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!)

Just a quick set of links right now, because I am actually, gasp, working on Killingly — and therefore looking at things like this, the most perfect and lovely map of the Massachusetts train system in 1898 that you could imagine, and this account of the architectural changes in Pemberton Square in the late 1880s. And did you know that the Boston Police Department has digitized its annual reports back to 1885? I wonder if they were cooking the numbers even then.

So:

• Writers Malinda Lo and Cindy Pon have started DIYA, a site promoting diversity in YA fiction with an accompanying book tour planned. Very exciting!
• A more detailed NY Times article about the first mystery novelist, as a follow-up to the shorter NPR version of the piece I posted a few days ago.
• Two interesting essays about the current state of digital humanities research and digital humanities as a field: “The Meandering through Textuality Challenge” by Stephen Ramsay, and “The (DH) Stars Come Out in LA,” by Matthew Kirschenbaum (one of the most sensible and least defensive reactions to William Pannapacker’s article about a putative DH star system I’ve seen yet).

Today I come bearing a link to this fun Q&A, with very smart questions about writing process asked by Laura Maylene Walter and, er, answered by me, possibly in a less smart manner. Laura and I went to high school together, attended the PA Governor’s School for the Arts during the same summer, and worked on the high school lit mag together, as Laura mentions in her blog post. (I haven’t thought about that lit mag for so long. Oh dear. Layout flashbacks.) I wrote poetry back in high school, but Laura’s always been a fiction writer, and a very good one, too. She recently won the 2010 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, and her first short story collection, Living Arrangements, is forthcoming from BkMk Press in 2011.

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”?)

Kate Pullinger, whose The Mistress of Nothing will soon be released in the US, wrote a great post last week about historians who dismiss historical fiction (in this case, Antony Beevor and Niall Ferguson):

According to reports, Niall Ferguson says he never reads historical fiction because it ‘contaminates historical understanding’; Beevor says he thinks that historical novelists ought to mark in bold type ‘the bits they made up’.Nice to see two such hardy fellows claiming their unparalleled access to the truth.

Pullinger then quotes from a talk about history and historiography¹ delivered by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 2006 and printed in the NYRB., in which Schlesinger argues that “All historians are prisoners of their own experience and servitors to their own prepossessions. We are all entrapped in the egocentric predicament. We bring to history the preconceptions of our personality and the preoccupations of our age.” Beevor and Ferguson, no matter how pristine they consider their own historical understandings, are just as time-blind as everybody else — if not more so, because they’re so submerged in their own cultural context that it’s become invisible to them. (This is the same problem I have with Stanley Fish’s frequent tirades in the NY Times about bias in the classroom: the underlying assumption that choosing not to discuss one’s political beliefs in the classroom means that bias is eradicated. Right.) I’ll put the bits I make up in bold when Beevor agrees to do the same thing.

Pullinger concludes: “this is why fiction can sometimes be the only way to tell the truth.” In essence, she’s making a point pretty similar to that of Sarah Dunant’s recent piece in the London Times, which presents historical fiction as a means of “penetrating ‘otherness.’”

I agree with Dunant, and I loved Pullinger’s post, but I’d drop the “the” before “truth” in her last sentence. The point of Schlesinger’s essay, as Pullinger points out, is that there is no historical “truth.” It doesn’t exist, and even if it did, in some rarefied ideal form, we wouldn’t have access to it. But here’s the thing: for historical fiction, it doesn’t matter that there’s no one truth.

Schlesinger says that “the historian is committed to a doomed enterprise—the quest for an unattainable objectivity.” Writers of historical fiction aren’t. When I write historical fiction, I’m trying to make art. I want the art I make to be truthful, but I don’t pretend that I’m identifying or recording the truth about history.² (I don’t mean to suggest that Pullinger or Dunant would claim this either, though I assume that Beevor and Ferguson think they would.)

I don’t think most readers care if historical fiction represents “the truth,” either. Some do, of course, and I think most readers respond negatively to the obvious importation of contemporary attitudes or speech patterns or modes of thinking into historical settings. But the word that kept coming up in our Wiscon panel discussion about historical fiction wasn’t truth but “authenticity” — the feeling of truth, in other words. The bits we make up as historical fiction writers are there to add to that feeling of truth, whether they’re accurate or not, and the feeling of truth and recognition is crucial to the success of any kind of art. Human understanding — that’s what we’re after.

______

1. “Historiography” is one of my favorite things and one of my favorite words.

2. “Even things that are true can be proved.” (To keep company with the “stark postmodernist sentiments” Schlesinger quotes from John Lothrop Motley’s 1868 lecture.)

Via Elizabeth Chadwick on Twitter, I found this lovely set of photos of an experiment in Greek hairstyles done by students at Fairfield University. A small group of women with hair of the appropriate length and thickness were given braids like those on the Erechtheion marble caryatids who support the South Porch of the Acropolis. The shot-by-shot demonstration of the braiding is pretty remarkable.

Alcestis lived earlier than the era of the Acropolis, but I always imagined her wearing fairly similar braids.

Regarding more modern research, here’s a neat blog post by Richard Oram of the Harry Ransom Center (where I worked as an intern for two years) about “decline letters,” including a few examples by Edmund Wilson and G. B. Shaw. I actually found one from Wilson in a collection while doing other research for a patron and made Rich a copy; in fact, I made a bunch of copies for the staff, because it’s such a great little document. I had my copy tacked up over my inbox for the duration of my job there.

And finally: a hilarious takedown of Twilight‘s prose style. Such as it is.

Malinda Lo and Maggie Stiefvater both posted entertaining and useful accounts of their own takes on New Year’s resolutions. I’m not much of a resolution-maker either, but lists of goals? Oh dear. I’ve been using Basecamp to manage my to-do lists since last summer,  and it now contains 11 separate lists, some of terrifying length. I also have a Moleskine planner that I consider my second brain. This is what happens when you’re working on a dissertation and a novel simultaneously.

I won’t bore you with my to-do lists, but I am going to steal Malinda Lo’s concept and write up a list of reading resolutions — books I really want to read in 2010. Some of these are on my TBR list at GoodReads, and some aren’t. And while I’m sure I’ll be reading lots of academic nonfiction in the next year, this list is about fiction, since fiction tends to languish on the shelf when I’m busy with academic work. I’m aiming for ten books, and like Malinda, I’ll blog about each one here after I’ve read it.

1. The Sealed Letter, Emma Donoghue
2. The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (T. just reread this and convinced me to add it; I’m woefully lacking in exposure to Russian novels)
3. The Known World, Edward P. Jones
4. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
5. Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson (planning to read this with the Endicott Mythic Fiction group on GoodReads)
6. The Ambassadors, Henry James
7. The Golden Bowl, Henry James
8. The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
9. The Children’s Book, A. S. Byatt
10. The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins

Lots of historical fiction and literary thrillers, in preparation for writing Killingly, but also books I just plan to enjoy (the James, in particular, and the A. S. Byatt). One of my quasi-resolutions for the last year was to read more for pleasure, even when I felt like I didn’t have time — I tend to forget, when I’m really stressed, how much brighter life seems when I’m in the middle of a good book.

Any suggestions for books to add to this list?

A brief break from Alcestis today to talk about novel #2, the one that’s still a twinkle in my eye, as it were. I haven’t said much about it  here because I haven’t begun writing it yet — I’m keeping busy with the dissertation. I’ve researched and outlined it, and much as I wish I could be delving right into it, I’m also enjoying the process of collecting little bits of information related to 1890s America and to specific elements of the book — a sort of mental collage. (I’m also using Scrivener for the first time, since I’ve finally got a Mac laptop again. Not sure how well I’ll like it for actual writing, but it is great fun to make up loads of note cards.)

Yesterday, for example, I read a rather grim but also fascinating article in the Times, complete with not-actually-grisly slideshow, about the Windsor Hotel Fire in 1899. (See also this contemporary letter to the editor about the possible causes of the fire. I love that the Times finally took down the pay wall for old articles.) The bit that stuck with me was the mention of bricks from the collapsed building being reused:

Tens of thousands of those survive anonymously, reused on other building projects for rear or inner walls.

The notion of anonymously surviving bricks is sort of poetic — like buildings in England that still have bits of Tintern Abbey’s roof in them, or like the vanished slabs of marble from the sides of the Pyramids. Or, to use the comparison in the article itself, like the metal recovered from Ground Zero and recently used to build a new Navy ship — though that re-use is martial in a way the others aren’t. The main building at Mt. Holyoke burned down only a year before the events of my novel, but I don’t remember reading about whether or not any materials had been salvaged and used in the new dormitory buildings constructed afterward.

Today, via Holly Tucker on twitter, I found this article about “bachelor girls,” a subset of “New Women” who achieved financial independence but often had trouble finding suitable living situations as young unmarried ladies.

The more domesticated form of New Woman idealized at women’s colleges in the 1890s was the All Around Girl, described in another Times article from 1895, here:

There is no virtue of womanliness or of a strong, healthy nature that this typical American girl does not possess … . She realizes that upon her, individually as well as collectively, rests the duty of upholding all womanhood, and she is true to the trust.

No pressure or anything, ladies.

The all around girl was somewhat like a bachelor girl in her self-sufficiency, but societally safe — she was supposed to be independent, gregarious, charming, and intelligent, but not too serious about her studies, and all her talents were valued because they’d make her an excellent wife and mother.

There’s one all around girl in the novel-I-have-yet-to-write. Those of you who have read Alcestis will perhaps not be surprised to hear that she’s not one of the main characters. One of the main characters is based on a real girl; the other one’s my own, and like Alcestis, she tries to build a new life out of old bricks.

I’m just back from a conference and still stuck in the post-travel blahs — I was in Richmond at the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies and managed to get my flights screwed up by thunderstorms in both directions, sigh — but I wanted to share a few things:

Via my friend Elizabeth Scott (whose lovely Something, Maybe is now in bookstores!), a fascinating link about the cover design process for a new book about Columbine.

A New York Times article about a 40-foot clonal amoeba colony in a cow pasture near Houston.

In other news, I’ve started doing more in-depth research for my new novel idea. There’s nothing quite so giddiness-inspiring as walking around the library collecting an armful of books for a new research topic.