Gabriel Valjan and I connected because our short stories share the pages of the WINDWARD: Best New England Crime Stories anthology. His take on Lizzie Borden's life after giving her father forty-one whacks is a marvel of great story telling as well as terrific research. When we finally met at an author event (and via multiple tweets), I learned we shared many interests as well as a love of great writing. When the conversation turned to making great characters, I knew I had to share his insights with you. Enjoy! -cjh
A FIRST AMONG STRONG WOMEN by Gabriel Valjan
In 1997, eight-year old Alice
Newton stayed up all night to finish reading a manuscript after her father had teased
her with the first chapter. The next morning she insisted — no, she demanded —
that her father Nigel, the chairman of Bloomsbury Publishing, publish the book twelve
publishers had considered either too long or demanding for children. The book? Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. A
Muggle had intervened and saved Kathleen Rowling, the writer on welfare and
single parent, from obscurity. J.K. Rowling is now the world’s most lucrative
author.
In 1929, Virginia Woolf asserted
the barest of necessities a woman writer needed for success: “A room of her own
and five hundred a year.” Chance once again interceded. The death of an aunt
provided her with the £500 [about $45,000 today] per year for life. Though she
self-published most of her work, she experienced success. Virginia Woolf is considered
both a great stylist and an innovator of the English novel.
Talented as they were, success had come
to them through luck. Let me introduce you to the world’s first successful
women writer. Another strong woman. Born in Venice, Italy in 1364, Christine de
Pizan would live most of her life in France, where her father served Charles V
as physician and astrologer. Her father believed that she should have an
education. Christine married at the age of fifteen. Girls in her day married at
twelve, boys at fourteen. Ten years later, with three children, she is a widow.
Worse yet, Charles V and her father and another child died, so Christine lost
her standing in court and became the sole means of support for her children,
her mother, and a niece. She turned to writing to support her family.
Christine wrote whatever would fill
the money purse. She started with poetry, moved onto biographies, moral
treatises, and military theory. Gunpowder was new and artillery fascinated her.
The Hundred Years War was raging and she had patrons in England and France, on
both sides of the conflict. Her last work was a poem in honor of Joan of Arc.
Christine supervised the production of all her books, oversaw their translations
from Middle French into Middle English, and hired women scribes and an
illustrator named Anastasia. She controlled every aspect of publication. She believed
in quality artwork and design. The printing press would not exist until 1450
and an illuminated manuscript was a work of art.
Not only did she live off her
quill, she defended women in print. Women were then thought of as morally and
intellectually inferior to men, and they were portrayed as such in the works of
Boccaccio and especially in Jean de Meun’s Romance
of the Rose. She tackled misogyny by accusing male
authors of ingratitude and slander against all women. Christine used
sophisticated rhetorical strategies to point out the ironic contradictions that
men would create the genre of courtly love to seduce women only to mock and
devalue them in society. Christine advocated for the education of women and for
greater roles in society. Though prolific, she is best known for The Book of the City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies,
which provide insights into the daily lives of women, autobiographical details,
and chronicle the lives of famous women throughout history. Both works speak
directly to women readers. Christine de Pizan died in 1430. Almost forgotten,
even by medievalists until the mid-twentieth century, these two works were
translated into modern English in 1982 and 1985, respectively.
At a time when books by women are
reviewed less, awarded fewer literary prizes, the risk for disappearance is
greater. The underlying, less obvious, theme here is strength, of women helping
women. A girl, Alice Newton, helped J.K. Rowling, who in turn created Harry Potter,
a worldwide social phenomenon. Had Virginia Woolf not received an inheritance,
had she not written her novels, Hogarth Press, which she founded with her
husband Leonard in 1917, would have nonetheless secured her place in letters.
She and Leonard would go on to publish Vanessa Bell, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster,
Sigmund Freud, and Katherine Mansfield. In the long interlude of centuries
between Christine de Pizan and us, we glimpse a strong independent woman who created
art and commerce for women and by women.
Biography
The first book in his historical fiction series will be out in fall 2017.
Web: www.gabrielvaljan.com
Twitter: @GValjan
Amazon Author page: http://amzn.to/2pORYMH
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