Author Q & A with Stephanie Cowell on "Claude and Camille" and Bonus Giveaway!

Please give a warm welcome to author Stephanie Cowell! Author interviews are not my typical deal but since I am still madly in love with "Claude & Camille" I figured it was time to step out of the box and do something really special to celebrate the up coming paperback release of "Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet". You can check out my review, Stephanie's guest post on Monet, and my best reads of 2010 post for more on  "Claude and Camille". With out further delay lets kick off the interview!

  Q: I loved “Claude and Camille and named it my most beloved novel of 2010. My question is since you helped me envision the real person behind the inspirational water lilies paintings: what is it that inspired you to so passionately convey Claude and Camille’s tragic love?

A: Thank you so much for your kind words about the novel! You know we know very little about the real Camille; she died at 32 which is in itself horribly sad and some people believe it was Monet’s second wife Alice who destroyed all her papers. So we have a few facts about her here and there. My agent pointed out to me that Claude Monet painted more portraits of Camille than he ever painted of anyone in his life. I have been in the arts all my life as have most of my closest friends and money is seldom reliable in the arts. So we had Camille who was nineteen and full of illusions of the glory of living for art alone and Claude Monet who was very sexy at twenty-five (he looked like a young Johnny Depp) and he thought that any day, any week he would make his fortune with his work. In reality they sometimes had no food money and were thrown out of their rooms because they could not pay their rent and had to pawn their things. When she died, he was still so poor he had to try to get her necklace out of pawn so she could be buried in it. So they had this passionate love against a very difficult reality and when she became so sick, he was working too hard to provide food to know how to get the best care for her. I think that haunted him all his life.

Q: “Claude and Camille” really brings to light the phrase “poor starving artist”, how proud are you that you can say your award winning novel contributes to part of the impressionism legacy Claude left behind?

A: I am very proud to have been able to bring Claude Monet to life as a young man as well as the other young painters who one day would band together for their first exhibition (which they paid for) and be called Impressionists by a sneering critic who thought their work was pretty awful. “A bad sketch for wallpaper is better,” he wrote. The sort of work Claude and his friends were doing was very shocking to most people; it wasn’t art.

Q:  Since “Claude and Camille” is now being sold at Monet’s home of the water lilies Giverny. I am curious to see if you have had the chance to visit there? If so where was your favorite Monet spot?

A: Oh yes, I did visit there but a few years ago, during the research period for the novel. I loved standing on the Japanese bridge the most. It was April and the water lilies had nor bloomed yet. It was an intensely spiritual experience for me. I felt Monet everywhere. And then after I was walking down the path outside the house and saw a church with steps rising to it and I had to climb them! And I did not know he was buried there. I found his family tomb with his name on it and I took a tiny sprig of some plant growing near the grave and brought it back to my husband who could not travel with me. There was a crowd in the Giverny gift shop but the graveyard was quite deserted.

Q: Monet has been inspiring the masses for some time now and I must ask which work of his is your favorite and why?

A: May I name two? My favorite is oddly from the period of the novel, a painting of the village of Vétheuil seen from across the icy river in winter. It’s in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. It’s profoundly lonely. I wrote it into the novel as the thing he paints before he understands for the first time that Camille is very ill. He was painting and painting then and dragging his work into Paris to try to sell some of it. The second favorite is of the Japanese bridge over the lily pond. He painted it a lot. There are beautiful ones in Princeton and the Metropolitan Museum of New York.

Q: I have noticed a trend in your novels that they feature creative power houses like Mozart and Monet. Your unquestionable gift for prose is clear but do you hide any other creative muses in your life?

A: Oh goodness, well I was a classical singer for years. I sang a lot of the Mozart roles in very small opera houses. I miss singing with others very much, but you have to practice a lot and I haven’t in ages. And I love theater. I belong to a Shakespeare reading group and always hope I don’t get cast as the villain as I am bad at villains. No other gifts at all! My parents were painters and I think I was too intimidated to try.

Q: “Claude and Camille” has won a few awards would you care to enlighten us on its success with readers?

A: Unless I am forgetting something, I can say in all modesty that the only “award” it had was for one of the best novels of the year from January magazine. Maybe you are seeing its happy future! I won an American Book Award for a previous novel about an Anglican priest and physician in London circa 1640 called The Physician of London, which was the second book of a trilogy which I have yet to complete. But I have had just the most amazing e-mails from people about how much they loved Claude and Camille. I had a fair number from men too and of course it has had some marvelous reviews, including yours!

Q: Are you currently working on another project?

A: I am working on two projects at the time. One is about the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her incredible love story with Robert Browning who snatched her away from her London home when she was an invalid of forty and took her to live a romantic live in Italy. And the second is a love story set in an English abbey during the period when Henry VIII was closing all the abbeys; it’s from the point of view of the abbot’s goddaughter who grows up as a bookbinder amid the monks. I am not sure which one will be finished first.

For more on Stephanie Cowell and her lovely novels, you can check out the below links:
Her Website and be sure to check out the dates and locations of her live upcoming events!
Her Blog: EVERYDAY LIVES OF THE FRENCH IMPRESSIONISTS
Facebook & Twitter

Amazon 

 

The Giveaway Rules

You must fill out the form below to have your entry included in the drawing

The giveaway ends April 4th at midnight

Up for grabs is 5 COPIES YES FIVE. They are brand new paperback copies.

Giveaway is only open to US residents, Sorry.

Q & A with Kate Emerson on her New Release: Between Two Queens

The amazing author Kate Emerson has been gracious in granting an Q and A interview with Historically Obsessed. Her new release the second installment of the Secrets of the Tudor Court series, Between Two Queens in now available in stores everywhere. With out delay welcome Kate Emerson...

Q: What was the inspiration behind the title "Between Two Queens"?

A: I never really know where titles come from, although my agent and editor are always quick to tell me if they don't like them. In this story, each time Nan Bassett came to the attention of foreign ambassadors and other gossips at court it was because Henry VIII was between queens and taking a look around for possible candidates. Whether they were candidates to be the next queen or a new mistress is sometimes unclear, but this tendency on the king's part and the fact that Nan was apparently in the running right up until the time King Henry married Kathryn Parr, made the title inevitable.

Q: In your history of protagonist, what is the deciding factor in choosing your main character?

A: I always look for someone who was a little bit different. Both Jane Popyncourt (in THE PLEASURE PALACE) and Nan Bassett (in BETWEEN TWO QUEENS) stood out at court and came to the attention of chroniclers. This was no mean feat, because the men recording history in those days, and the men writing about it for generations to come, tended to ignore women and their role in events. Of course the records aren't always flattering to females who made the cut, but that just makes those ladies more interesting to me. I try to figure out, extrapolating from what is know about them, just why they behaved the way they did and what might have happened to them during the periods in their lives for which there is no historical record.

Q: How difficult was it to portray Anne Bassett as you visualized her?

A: A great deal of Anne Bassett's life was revealed in the family letters confiscated when her stepfather was arrested. That gave me a head start on developing the character, but it also presented a number of challenges, since there were some pretty big gaps during which no one mentioned her at all. One of them was just about nine months long, which was certainly food for thought! I arbitrarily gave "Mistress Anne," as she's usually referred to in the letters, the nickname Nan and that helped make her a more rounded person in my mind. After that it was mostly a case of experimenting with what would work for the story and what wouldn't and trying to figure out how a person with Nan's background would react to certain situations.

Q: What led up to the cultivation of Anne's bratty personality?

A: I never actually thought of her as a brat. Spoiled, certainly, and self-centered, and goal-oriented. Certain scenes, such as the one in which she pitches a fit because the pearls her mother sent her aren't good enough, come right out of history, so the challenge was to try and provide a reason for her to behave that way. In a later scene, hearing about the incident, Ned thinks it out of character for her, and I did, too. But something even Nan isn't yet aware of at that point does provide a reason for her irrational behavior.

Q: Can you give any details on the next book "By Royal Decree"?
A: I'm currently writing this one, which features Elizabeth Brooke, Lord Cobham's daughter, who appears briefly near the end of BETWEEN TWO QUEENS. She made her mark on history in a couple of ways, one political (she's the one who apparently suggested Lord Guildford Dudley as a husband for Lady Jane Grey) and one very personal. She fell in love with Queen Kathryn Parr's brother, William, but he already had a wife. He'd divorced her because she'd taken a lover but, under Henry VIII's church, it was no longer possible for the Pope to annul a marriage and allow the parties to wed someone else. For a decade, Bess Brooke and Will Parr were at the mercy of whoever was in power as to whether they were married or not. One royal decree (from Edward VI) permitted them to wed. Another (from Queen Mary) invalidated the marriage. Then Bess found herself entangled in plots to make sure that Elizabeth Tudor, the one person who might declare her married again, would still be around to succeed Queen Mary. All in all, lots of intrigue, danger, and romance. What more could I ask for? I hope to have the rough draft done later this month. The polished manuscript is due on my editor's desk on March 15, and the book will be published just about a year from now.

Thank you Kate for paying a visit to Historically Obsessed. I look forward to the completion of "by Royal Decree" and can not wait to devour it just like the previous two.

Q&A Interview with Kate Emerson

My first author Q and A interview and it is Kate Emerson! Her novel "Secrets of the Tudor Court: Pleasure Palace" is a favorite of mine. She was gracious enough to guide me through my first interview. Thank You Kate and I am so looking forward to "Between Two Queens". Here we go!

Q: Jane Popyncourt is not a typical or well know name in historical fiction, what inspired you to write a novel about her?

A: It was because she ISNT well known. I’ve always been more interested in the people on the fringes of the royal courts, and in those who never even went to court, than in the historical figures everyone has heard of. Jane in particular caught my attention because historians couldn’t seem to make up their minds about her. They didn’t even agree on whether she came to England from France or from Flanders, which is why I invented a parent from each of those places for her. Then, as I did more research, I discovered that some of the “facts” about Jane were just plain wrong. For one thing, the duc de Longueville didn’t set her up in the Louvre (implying close to the royal court) after she arrived in France in 1516. The Louvre was in ruins at that time and wasn’t used for much of anything. And, more importantly, Longueville died only a few months after Jane left England.

Q: In your research for "Secrets of the Tudor Court: Pleasure Palace" how difficult was it to find references to such a mysterious lady? How long was your research process?

A: This is a tough question to answer because I’ve been doing research on sixteenth century women for a very long time—over thirty years. My first published book, way back in 1984, was WIVES AND DAUGHTERS: THE WOMEN OF SIXTEENTH CENTURY ENGLAND. It’s horribly out of date now, since there is a great deal more information available these days than there was when I was writing it back in the early 1980s, but I made notes on my copy over the years and when I launched by KateEmersonHistoricals.com website, I started putting updated entries online. This is still a work in progress, but it gives me a wealth of information to draw on for my novels. Essentially, I read every book on the sixteenth century I can get my hands on, especially biographies, and pick up bits of information about little-known women (a footnote here and a sentence there) along the way. One of my major sources for information on Jane was a biography, MARY TUDOR, THE WHITE QUEEN, by Walter C. Richardson.

Q: For historical accuracy since there is not readily too much information available on her what historical liberties did you take to complete Jane?

A:Part of Jane’s appeal as a character (and this goes for Anne Bassett, protagonist of my next novel, too) was that there are so many questions about her. Where did she come from? Why was she, of all the girls Henry VII might have chosen, selected to be a companion to his two daughters? Who were her parents and what happened to them? And then, later in her life, the big question: why was King Louis so set against letting her accompany Henry VIII’s sister Mary to France? The history books say it was because of her affair with Longueville, but the French weren’t prudish about mistresses. Besides, King Louis reportedly said Jane should be burnt. Burning was the punishment for witchcraft (in France; in England witches were hanged) and for petty treason, which was the murder of a husband or, in the case of a servant, a master. I thought Louis’s comment very strange, given the circumstances, so I devoted a great deal of thought to coming up with an explanation that made sense to me. There was also a rumor that Jane was Henry VIII’s mistress, just because he gave her a parting gift of £100. Granted this was a generous present, but she’d been a loyal retainer of the royal family for a very long time and I don’t believe it implies anything in particular about her relationship with Henry. It did provide the inspiration for another scene in the novel, however.

So, what liberties did I take? Quite a few. I didn’t change anything that is known about Jane, but those gaps in our knowledge of her background and activities were fair game. I don’t want to give away too much for those who haven’t read THE PLEASURE PALACE, so suffice it to say I invented a reason for Henry VII to take an interest in Jane as well as two reasons why her mother (who is entirely fictional) brought her to England from France. Jane comes to believe that her mother was murdered. Could she have been? And could the high-profile person Jane finally concludes was responsible really have killed someone for that reason? Such things did happen in the Tudor era and I hope I’ve presented a convincing case with circumstantial evidence. In real life, of course, there was no such murder, but everything else Jane knows about the people she suspects—the actions they took and the choices they made—comes right out of the history books. Jane (and I) have just come up with our own interpretation of the facts. The other big question about Jane is what happened to her after she left England. She wrote letters to the king’s sister and sent gifts to the children Mary Tudor had by Charles Brandon, so we know that she was comfortably well off in France. And on at least one occasion, Mary wrote to Jane to ask her to use her influence at the French court, so she had obviously met a few of the movers and shakers there. But, as I said in answer to your earlier question, it was not as Longueville’s mistress that she remained in France. I admit to wanting Jane’s story to have a happy ending. Since I had to make one up anyway, and we don’t know who Jane’s father was or if she ever married, I felt free to invent what might have happened.

Q: On your upcoming Novel, how excited are you that your second novel "Secrets of the Tudor Court, Between Two Queens" is Due to release January 5Th 2010?

A: I’m eagerly looking forward to it, especially since I’ve just (early September) finished proofreading the “first pass pages”—what were called galleys in the days before computers. BETWEEN TWO QUEENS takes place in 1537-1543, more than twenty years after THE PLEASURE PALACE ends, and there have obviously been some changes at court, but King Henry is still there and still has an eye for the ladies.

Q: Is there a special novel in your heart that changed you life? Also what are you currently reading?

A: I can’t pinpoint any one novel that changed things for me, either one I read or one I wrote, but I grew up reading my father’s favorite authors—Thomas B. Costain, Frank Yerby, and Margaret Campbell Barnes. A little later I discovered Anya Seton’s novels, and then the incomparable Dorothy Dunnett. These days I tend to read mostly genre fiction (and nonfiction, of course) rather than historicals. It’s too easy to pick up other novelists interpretations of history if I read novels et in the same period I write about. So, I read what I don’t write. I’m a big fan of Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series and paranormal mysteries by Kim Harrison and Jim Butcher. As I write this, I have bookmarks in two novels. One is Lindsay Davis’s latest Falco mystery, ALEXANDRIA, set in Roman times. The other is an older historical romance from Jo Beverley, SKYLARK, set in the Regency period. I’m reading it for the second time. In fact, over the last couple of months I’ve been rereading all of her “Company of Rogues” series.