Katharine Weber and Mary Sharratt, pt. 1

In the latest Author2Author exchange, Katharine Weber and Mary Sharratt talk about historical fiction. Mary's most recent novel, The Vanishing Point, is a suspense tale set in early colonial Maryland, while Katharine's Triangle revisits one of the worst industrial accidents in American history, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, in which 146 garment workers died, unable to escape the ninth floor of their burning factory. Katharine is reading tonight at the Tenement Museum, on Manhattan's Lower East Side—a perfect venue to discuss the historical elements of her novel.

Katharine Weber: When you were researching The Vanishing Point, did you discover information that took your novel in some way, large or small, off the path you had in mind? Did you discover historical details that surprised you and inspired you to add certain elements in the plot or certain features to your characters?

Mary Sharratt: The story was based on a novella I wrote in the early 1990s before I did much research. From the very beginning, I had the two sisters—May, who is lost, and Hannah, who is searching for her—and Gabriel, the man who is in turn May's husband and Hannah's lover.

However, my original plot became much more complex when I realized how harsh life was in 17th-century Maryland and how isolated the English settlers were. We tend to base our image of American colonial life on the New England model, but the Chesapeake was an utterly different world. Instead of the close knit New England village, you had far flung plantations mimicking a wilderness version of English feudalism. The gentleman landowner had nearly absolute power over his family, indentured servants, and slaves. Yet, paradoxically, it was a very perilous place for a landowner to be—isolated in the back country where, in some cases, blacks far outnumbered whites. As I was writing, I became intrigued with the possibility of mutiny on these remote plantations. What if the servants overthrow their master? This became a crucial part of the story.

Also, the mortality rate was incredibly high. The slave trade brought malaria and yellow fever to the region. English settlers, who had no natural resistance to these diseases, died in droves, leaving countless children to be raised by step parents and servants. There were no English physicians in the Chesapeake in this era. If you needed medical attention, you did for yourself or went to the blacksmith for surgery. Ships sailed from to and from England only once a year. Thus, it would take a year, sometimes more, for a letter to English relatives to arrive.

This research made it all the more poignant for Hannah, who remained in England to take care of her aging father, while her beloved sister sailed off to Maryland to wed a young man she had never met. I thought about how these two sisters would long for each other and how difficult any communication between them would be until Hannah was free to sail to America and join her sister.

Mary Sharratt: After three contemporary novels, what inspired you to base your new novel on the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire? How did the experience of writing this differ from that of your previous work? Would you consider Triangle to be a historical novel?

Katharine Weber: I have had a lifelong fascination for the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, because my paternal grandmother worked in the Triangle as a buttonhole finisher, in 1909. I grew up in New York knowing about that fire, knowing that the women who died there were young immigrants just like her, fresh from Ellis Island. I have long had in mind to write something about the fire. But then, in 2001, two things happened which brought it into focus for me. In March of that year, the oldest survivor of the fire died, at the age of 107, and her obituaries fascinated me in all sorts of ways. What was it like to be famous all your life for not having died in a fire ninety years ago? What would it be like to tell your story over and over? And then the novelist in me asked this: what would it be like to tell your story for ninety years—if your story was a lie?

Is Triangle a historical novel? Yes and no. Yes because significant events in the book take place in 1911, and I have reconstructed those events with all kinds of fictional documentation, from trial transcripts to oral histories. So my documentation is all fictional, but it documents true historic events. But the central story plays out in 2001. So, no, it is a contemporary novel about the way the past is present, about the way historic events that linger in the public mind may also continue to ripple outward and signify in private lives.