Images courtesy Virginia Pye
Author Virginia Pye returns to Richmond, where she previously lived, with her recently released novel, “The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann.” She’s participating in the 21st Annual James River Writers Conference, Oct. 6-8 at the Greater Richmond Convention Center, and a public launching of the title from 5:30 to 7 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 7, at Reynolds Gallery’s West Main Street location.
Pye’s past works have included novels about revolutionary China and short stories about individuals struggling to find something like happiness. Now, she’s delved into the rich tapestry of Boston’s historic literary life through the perspective of a dime novelist who desires instead the creation of serious work. This is set against a troubled marriage and upheaval in the publishing business that puts her at odds with how much she’s earning as opposed to the male writers.
The novel is reminiscent of one of those Merchant-Ivory period films. Except you can fill the cast from your own imagination.
Pye recently spoke with Richmond magazine about her latest literary creation.
Richmond magazine: This seems to be a departure, at least in terms of setting, from earlier work. But your novels start with the question “What if?”
Virginia Pye: I was walking around Cambridge [Massachusetts], where I live now, and I kept seeing people reading. They were reading on the subways, park benches; I saw people walking down the street while reading books. Books, not their phones — which is wonderful. ... Then I started noticing houses with plaques, and they weren’t to war heroes, and they weren’t to captains of industry, they were for authors. Cambridge is a delightfully bookish town.
I started to wonder what it would be like to be a woman living in this historical setting. I started reading books set in the period, I enjoyed Henry James’ “The Bostonians,” Edith Wharton, though she’s a bit after Victoria, and started reading nonfiction about women writers. Though she was earlier but inspirational, Margaret Fuller, and Louisa May Alcott.
I watched movies set in that era with those expectations of “The Gilded Age.” At the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe college, I stumbled on really only a few lines about Gail Hamilton, which was the nom de plume of Mary Abigail Dodge. In 1867 she sued her publisher Ticknor and Fields for deliberately underpaying her. And that’s all I read about it. In the end, I’m a fiction writer, not a historian.
RM: The cultural threads running through the story include issues familiar to us more than a century on, though now we may have different terms for these concerns: sexual identity and agency, and among issues of pay equity, drug addiction, race and class, freedom of speech and censorship, and women’s reproductive rights.
Pye: The novel takes place in 1899, so right on the cusp of a new century. That makes for an interesting moment, I think. In the minds of the characters, they see themselves as being forced into modernity — some embrace [it], and others try to hold it back.
When I was starting on my research, I found in the Brandeis University Library a treasure trove of dime novels with these sentimental stories full of moralizing about women who come in from the farms to live in the cities and what trouble may befall them if they’re not careful. In the back of these books are letters from real women who describe in different ways how they’d been taken advantage of by men — this was way before the Me Too [movement]. One after another, they’d been groped at work or held late at the office with the expectations of sex by their male boss. The advice was always, “Leave the job,” with no notion that you could fight it. If you turn the page, at the back of the dime novels are advertisements including for thinly veiled abortion-related procedures.
Then suddenly, much more recently, after I’d finished the book and it was at the publisher, when the [Texas federal district court decision] came down about the [1873] Comstock Act, my jaw dropped. [Editor’s note: Comstock returned to public view in relation to the mailing of mifepristone.] The Comstock law was used to block anything mailed through the postal service judged as obscene or lascivious. And it was done to, among other things, keep those abortion adverts out of the hands of young women. Also, mention of anything that might refer to what we’d call gay rights, any kind of things perceived as lewd. So, yes. Here we are again.
RM: One aspect of the novel is the celebration of the joy of those hand-held devices known as books and how screens don’t light up but people’s faces do. One can feel a little nostalgic. Yet you can also see a familiarity because people are reading, or bingeing, stories like Victoria Swann’s similar to how we watch streaming serials — which require writers to compose them.
Pye: Absolutely, that’s quite deliberate. This is my love story about books, readers and writers, and how incredibly important these are to each other and how it’s a shared society — people who love books and how vital that is to the culture, and so, absolutely, there’s nostalgia, and also a purpose to elevate. I also tried to approach the differentiation between “high” and “low” art and how different people can love a book for their own individual reasons. That’s among the many marvelous characteristics of the relationship between writers and readers.
