It’s now under a month until the release of the Bronte’s Mistress paperback! And I’m continuing my roundup of press, with a post covering articles about the novel that were published in March and April this year.
Fellow historical novelist, Asha Lemmie, who I did an event with in September last year, recommended Bronte’s Mistress to Good Morning America fans, in a piece about Women’s History Month. Check out her other picks, along with Fiona Davis’s here.
Nicholas E. Barron republished our 2020 interview on Medium. He asked me questions about Oxford, research surprises, Lydia’s relationship with her daughters, and more. And Bronte’s Mistress got a shout out in another Medium article on how adults can embrace “Back to School” rituals to make first days more bearable.
I spoke to A Sweat Life about how people can reach their reading goals. The Bear View gave Bronte’s Mistress a great review.
Meanwhile Sharon Van Meter included my novel in a list of the best books that illuminate lesser-known historical events for Off The Shelf. Bringing us full circle, Asha Lemmie’s Fifty Words for Rain was also featured in the same article!
I’m getting busy again with events, giveaways and more planned for the Bronte’s Mistress paperback release. But if you’d like me to talk to your book club or interview me for your blog, get in touch—via Facebook or Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. For monthly updates from me on my books, blog and other writing, sign up to my email newsletter below.
It’s 2021, which means it’s no longer my debut year, but I still have one final monthly roundup of articles about my novel, Bronte’s Mistress. Check out the February/March, April/May, June/July, August, September, October and November editions for a trip down memory lane, but today I’m covering coverage from December 2020.
In celebration of the season, I was the speaker at the Oxford and Cambridge Society of New England’s (virtual) Christmas Party. It was so much fun sharing how I researched and wrote my book with fellow Oxford alumni, and, yes, so Cambridge people too (catch a recording here).
My final podcast appearance of the year, with New Books in Historical Fiction, also aired. I was in conversation with fellow novelist C.P. Lesley, who wrote a great article, “The Corset of Culture” on Lydia Robinson’s dilemma in Bronte’s Mistress.
My book was named one of the best of the year by bloggers The Literate Quilter and Writer Gurl NY, while the Captivated Reader blog listed my Austen vs. the Brontes discussion with The Jane Austen Society author Natalie Jenner one of the best virtual author events of the year (listen to our debate here).
And Bookreporter included Bronte’s Mistress in their annual roundup of Bets On picks. Carol Fitzgerald’s roundup of 40+ of the best books of the year is well worth watching, so make a cup of tea, settle back and enjoy!
Looking back at the year, here are some quick (not very scientifically counted) stats of what went down (mostly since my novel’s release in August):
I wrote 16+ personal essays about the book, many of which are linked in these August and September summaries.
I appeared on 10+ radio shows and podcasts, all of which are listed on my website.
I spoke at 30+ virtual events (check out the blog posts tagged "Video" for some that were recorded).
I kept track of 100+ articles about the book and/or interviews with me, but am sure I missed some!
I am so grateful to the journalists, bloggers, Bookstagrammers, YouTubers, reviewers, authors, bookstores and librarians who have supported me on this most unusual of debut years. From the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU!
The Bronte’s Mistress paperback comes out in June, and I’ve already started receiving some 2021 coverage, but I’ll be pivoting to bimonthly press summaries again to blog a little more about nineteenth-century literature and culture, and a little less about my book.
Don’t forget that you can always contact me—on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. I also send a monthly email newsletter (sign up below) and Bronte’s Mistress is available in hardcover, audiobook and e-book now.
After a crazy couple of months in August and September, October was a quieter month in terms of press for my debut novel, Bronte’s Mistress, which tells the true story of Lydia Robinson, the woman rumoured to have had an affair with Branwell Bronte, the Bronte sisters’ brother. Still, I wanted to share some of the publications that were good enough to feature the book last month!
I’m a double alumna of the University of Oxford, with a BA from Merton College and an MSt from Corpus Christi College, so I was delighted that the university’s North American office featured me as the Alumni Author of the month for October. Looking back at their other 2020 picks, I loved seeing the range of topics fellow Oxfordians have written about—from DNA to environmental policy in Vietnam to resilience—but was surprised to be the only fiction writer featured this year.
Clarissa Harwood published a great blog post in support of debut novelists who’ve had to contend with a 2020 release date. I loved seeing Bronte’s Mistress as one of her historical fiction picks. I read and enjoyed A.H. Kim’s A Good Family, one of her choices for women’s fiction, and Tonya Mitchell’s A Feigned Madness and Rita Woods’s Remembrance are definitely on my TBR list!
Fall in Brooklyn
Writer C.P. Lesley also included my novel on her Fall Bookshelf roundup. I recently recorded an episode for her New Books in Historical Fiction podcast, which I look forward to sharing with you in the next week or so. And speaking of podcasts, check out my appearance on the History Through Fiction podcast, which also aired last month.
Finally, the Attic Girl blog had the distinction of being the first holiday gift guide to feature Bronte’s Mistress! If you’re buying holiday gifts for a literature lover I of course highly recommended getting them a copy of my book! Other novels recommended on the list are Natalie Jenner’s The Jane Austen Society, which I wrote about here, and Rachel McMillan’s The London Restoration.
Zoom on...
Thank you for another month of support, nice messages, and reviews. If you’d like to keep up with all news about Bronte’s Mistress and my writing, follow me on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, and sign up to receive my monthly email newsletter below.
In August 2020, my debut
novel, Bronte’s Mistress, about the older woman who had an affair
with Branwell Bronte, will be published by Atria Books. It’s been a long road
to getting traditionally published and I’ve had to learn a LOT along the way.
So, in this Writers’ Questions series, I’m sharing some advice about the
process to help fellow writers.
Signing with a literary agent is
the most common first step if you want a contract from a major publisher. In a previous blog post, I wrote how to find literary agents that might be a good
fit for you and your novel. But once you have your dream list, what next? I
hate to break it to you, but it’s time to write the dreaded query letter.
Query letters are almost always
query emails in today’s digital-first
era of communication. Think of them as similar to the cover letters you might
write when applying for jobs. The role of a cover letter is to get you an
interview. The role of a query letter is to get an agent to read your
manuscript.
Different agents may have
different requirements for the queries they receive so it’s ALWAYS important to check out their
agency website to understand their specific asks, but there is formula that
will work pretty universally.
It goes like this:
Dear AGENT NAME,
I am querying you because PERSONALISATION [This is where you can mention how you found
them. In Acknowledgments of a book you loved? On Twitter? Via #MSWL? Don’t know
what these things mean? Read my earlier post.]
DESCRIPTION OF YOUR NOVEL [This should be similar in length to what you might find on the
back of a published book. It begins with the main character vs. a long
description of the setting and/or backstory. Who are they and what is their
predicament? Don’t give away your ending. This is a spoiler-free zone.]
TITLE, LENGTH, GENRE & COMP TITLES [Unless you mentioned any of these in your personalisation
section above.]
DESCRIPTION OF YOU [Don’t
overthink this. Your bio should be one to two sentences mentioning anything
relevant. For example if your novel is for children and you have children,
mention it! If your main character is a cardiologist and so are you, wonderful!
If you’ve had stories published in the New
Yorker, shout it from the rooftops. Otherwise, simply saying “I live in PLACE and work in THIS DAY JOB” is
fine.]
Thank you for your consideration, [Or other appropriate sign off.]
YOUR NAME
Some common mistakes to watch out
for include trying to be quirky (e.g. writing the letter from your main character—don’t
do this!), getting the agent’s name wrong (I addressed my letters by first name
since I didn’t want to assume whether agents were Ms/Miss/Mrs/Dr etc.),
spending too long on your biography (the query letter should be about your
novel more than about you), and not leading with character in your novel
description.
It should also go without saying
that you shouldn’t be rude to or threaten the agent (you wouldn’t threaten a
recruiter in a cover letter!), yet agent horror stories pop up about this all the
time.
Below, I’m inserting my query
letter, which led me to signing with an agent. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but
it did the job:
Dear Danielle,
I am querying you as we have similar
reading taste (I also love Wuthering Heights, Rebecca and anything by Jane Austen) and I thought
my historical novel, BRONTË’S MISTRESS, might be of interest to you.
Yorkshire, 1843. Lydia Robinson is mistress of Thorp Green Hall—or
at least she should be. But her daughters are rebelling, her mother-in-law is
scrutinising her every move and her marriage is hanging by a thread following
the death of her beloved younger daughter a year earlier.
That’s when Branwell Brontë arrives to act as her son’s tutor.
Branwell is imaginative, passionate and uninhibited by the social conventions
that Lydia has followed without question since her girlhood. He’s also
twenty-five to Lydia’s forty-three and oh so very easy to manipulate.
A love of literature, music and theatre soon bring mistress and
tutor together but Lydia is being watched—and not just by her husband. Her
servants and the governess (Branwell’s judgmental sister Anne) are starting to
ask questions. Her daughters are embarking on romantic entanglements of their
own.
With her husband’s health failing, Branwell’s behaviour growing
more erratic and exposure threatened from several quarters, it’s up to Lydia to
create a chance for her own happiness. Can she find meaning in her life without
losing her children along the way?
BRONTË’S MISTRESS, complete at 80,000 words, is the true and
previously untold story of the woman Mrs Gaskell called "that bad woman who corrupted Branwell
Brontë". The novel is the result of my meticulous research into the
time Anne and Branwell Brontë spent at Thorp Green Hall. I have two degrees from
the University of Oxford, including a Master’s (with Distinction) in
nineteenth-century literature. By day, I work in advertising. By night, I write
fiction and run a successful blog on nineteenth-century literature and
culture—the Secret Victorianist.
Thank you for your time and consideration,
Finola
You might have noticed that I used a
rhetorical question, which some writers say is a no-go in query writing, but I
think one can work (though definitely not more than one!).
I also didn’t include comp (comparative)
titles as I couldn’t come up with recent novels I thought were a perfect fit.
Once we “went on submission” with the manuscript to publishers, we did include
comp titles, thanks to my agent’s knowledge and guidance. These were Longbourn (2013) by Jo Baker and Z (2013) by Therese Anne Fowler.
Writing a query letter can be
tough but it’s a wonderful exercise in discovering the heart of your novel and
how best to sell it to others. It’ll help you answer that dreaded question
“what’s your book about?” from now until forever, hopefully without boring
those around you. Even if you’re not quite ready to query, starting to draft
the letter can be really useful.
Do you have any other questions
about finding, querying or working with a literary agent? Let me know—here, on
Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.
And if you want to learn more
about Bronte’s Mistress, including
pre-order and order links, launch events and more, sign up for my email
newsletter below:
Reading Rebecca Mead’s
part-memoir, part biography of Mary Anne Evans (1819-1880), better known by her
nom de plume George Eliot, was an
exercise in confronting the familiar.
Even on the surface there is much
in Mead’s life that resembles my own. We’re both British transplants, brought
up in small towns, but now living in Brooklyn. We both studied English at
Oxford. And we share a love for Eliot’s novel Middlemarch (1871-2), which Virginia Woolf called, famously, ‘one of the few English novels written
for grown-up people’.
My Life in Middlemarch weaves together
Eliot and Mead’s life stories with the latter’s reflections on the novel and
details of her journalistic research. This too was recognisable to me. As a
writer of historical fiction, I’ve also gone on pilgrimages to find traces of
history below the surface of modern English life. Mead’s emotions as she
traverses streets Eliot would have walked and takes tea in rooms she frequented
were relatable, tinged as her descriptions are with the complex feelings of the
emigrant for the land she’s left behind.
But the
familiarity I found most difficult to confront is the topic at the memoir’s
core. When we find a book we love it can be easy to feel that it is written for
us, and only us. We construct an imaginary conversation with its creator that
can overcome decades, oceans and even death. Mead’s reaction to Middlemarch, and the very publication of
her memoir, is a testament to the fact that our responses to great works of
literature are not unique.
Rebecca Mead (1966- )
This is
a fitting revelation for a book centred on Middlemarch,
a novel which also makes us face the truth that we are not special and that other lives as passionately lived as ours end
with graves that go ‘unvisited’.
I’d
recommend My Life in Middlemarch to
anyone who’s read and loved George Eliot, but also to those who’ve read her
books and wondered what they were missing and what others see to admire so
deeply. For those uninitiated into Middlemarch
it may be a more perplexing read, but who knows—sometimes a date with the
unknown is even more compelling than the familiar.
What
book would you like to see the Secret Victorianist read and review next? Let me
know—here, on Facebook, or by tweeting @SVictorianist.
A couple of weeks ago the Secret
Victorianist attended a production of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, staged by the students of Barnard College here in
New York City. It was my second ‘Greek Play’, as I was also at Oxford’s most
recent Greek Play in 2014—a production of Aeschylus’s The Libation Bearers. And, during my Masters, I had also spent time
investigating the homosocial and publishing culture around the 1900 Cambridge
Greek Play—Aeschylus’s Agamemnon—(a subject
I’ve blogged about before).
The Harvard Greek Play in 1906
My night at Barnard however made
me wonder about the history of the Greek Play in America. Were American
universities slower to join in the nineteenth-century renaissance of
performances in Ancient Greek than their British counterparts? The programme
told me Barnard’s Greek Play was an annual event, but only one dating back to
1977. I wanted to do some more digging to find out.
What I found was a
fascinating journal article from the Classical
Journal, published October 1910. D.D. Hains’s ‘Greek Plays in America’ is a
topline summary of American institutions’ performances of classical plays in
ancient languages, and translation, and shows the speed with which these
universities took to the tradition being established in Britain.
Oxford’s first Greek
Play was an Agamemnon given in 1880,
which was later repeated in Eton, Harrow and London. Cambridge’s inaugural
Greek Play, Ajax, came two years
later in 1882.
But Harvard
University in fact nearly pipped Oxbridge to the post. A production of Antigone was originally planned to
celebrate the opening of the Sanders’ Theatre in 1876, but was ultimately
abandoned. And so Harvard’s first Greek play, Oedipus Tyrannus, was actually performed in May 1881. The venture
was an immediate success. The five performances drew audiences totaling 6,000
and a professional company took the production, in translation, to New York and
Boston for an additional two weeks.
The University of Toronto's Antigone (1882)
I was also surprised
to find that the second university Greek Play on the American continent was
Canadian. Toronto University staged Antigone
in 1882 and, again, in 1894.
The University of
Pennsylvania can lay claim to the first Greek comedy, the Acharnians, in 1886, while Smith College was the first with a
female cast, producing Sophocles’ Electra
in 1889.
Haines estimates 101
performances based on Ancient Greek drama at 47 American institutions between
1881 and 1910, with around half as many in Latin from a slightly reduced pool
of universities. His conclusion that ‘the
increasing number of such performances augurs happily for the future of the
classics in our schools and colleges’ might have been slightly optimistic,
but the tradition does live on at schools like Barnard, even as the popularity
of a classical education has waned.
What would you like
to see the Secret Victorianist blog about next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.
Last weekend I went to an
exhibition that is a testament to the far-reaching power of the human
imagination and to the importance of collaborative scholarship.
The exhibition
Alice in a World of Wonderlands marks 150 years since the publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
by investigating the translations into 176 different languages that have
emerged since the work’s publication and are the subject of a new book that
shares the exhibition’s name.
Finnish translation (1952)
Finding and cataloguing these
translations, and their editions, was a labour of love and involved a lot of
detective work, with over 250 unpaid volunteers tracking down texts all over
the world.
Christina Rossetti's signed copy of the first (German) translation of Alice (1869)
German was the first language
other than English in which Alice
first came to life (in 1869).French,
Swedish, Italian, Danish and Dutch soon followed in the nineteenth century,
some with Carroll’s knowledge and consent, others without.
Catalan translation (1927)
But it is in the twentieth
century that we see a proliferation of Alices
(not that the central character always has this name). From Breton to Urdu,
Esperanto to Pitjantjatjara, Hebrew to Malay, many readers have been taken down
the rabbit hole. The question is – what do they find there?
Vladamir Nabokov's (Russian) translation (1923)
Alice in a World of Wonderlands, edited by Jon A. Lindseth and Alan Tannenbaum, for instance, contains
251 back translations into English to see how different translators approached
the task of rendering one of Carroll’s poems:
Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
How I wonder what you're at!
Up above the world you fly,
Like a tea tray in the sky.
Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
How I wonder what you're at!
Romanian translation (1991)
Native English speakers recognise
this as a parody of the children’s nursery rhyme ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little
star’, but translated literally into another tongue this context will be lost.
This speaks directly to the translation debate of domestication vs.
foreignisation. In other words, is it the role of the translator to educate the
reader about the culture in which it was produced (here Victorian Britain) or
to make the writer’s intention more immediately apparent by using shorthands
with which he or she is familiar from their own culture.
Marathi translation (1982)
The translator of a version in
Marathi for example (one of 12 Indian languages included in the catalogue) was
one of those who decided to play with a rhyme familiar to his readers. He
writes:
‘When I transformed Alice into Jaai I taught her not only customs
and traditions of this land, but also the popular songs of this soil known to
all.’
Poster for a Japanese stage play (1998)
Seeing the exhibition in person,
one of the most obvious things to be struck by is the incredible range of
visual responses to the text and John Tenniel’s illustrations. Cover
illustrations range from the saccharine to the surreal, with the influence of
Disney’s 1951 animated feature film clear. Alice
seems to hold particular visual appeal in Japan, as posters for Alice-inspired stage plays are also on
display here – maybe not surprising given the natural co-option of Alice into Lolita fashion.
Alphagram translation (2012)
This interactive map allows you
to explore the myriad wonderlands inspired by one story told in Oxford on a
sunny day, but if you’re in New York City, I’d definitely recommend checking
out the exhibition in person. I already reviewed the Morgan Library &
Museum’s retrospective into the novel’s origins, but it is at the Grolier Club
that the legend of Alice seems to be very much alive.
Hebrew translation (1923)
The exhibition Alice in a World of Wonderlands, The
Translations of Lewis Carroll’s Masterpiece is running until November 21 at the Grolier Club. Entrance is free.
Bosnian translation (2008)
Do you know of any other
nineteenth-century exhibitions in NYC you think the Secret Victorianist should
visit? Let me know – here, on Facebookor by tweeting
@SVictorianist.
