Katharine Weber & Mary Sharratt, pt. 2

Katharine Weber and Mary Sharratt continue their discussion about their new novels, The Vanishing Point and Triangle.

Katharine Weber: What draws you as a writer to the historical setting in the first place? I mean that in general—why write a novel set in the past? And specifically, why write a novel set in THIS past? Do you think you will always write historical novels? Why or why not? Can you envision ever writing an entirely contemporary story?

Mary Sharratt: I'm intrigued by history, especially women's history, because I believe our view of the past is often distorted. We tend to have lazy stereotypes that women in the past were completely helpless and disempowered, but if you actually sit down and do the research, you learn about movers and shakers such as Anne Hutchinson, the religious dissenter who helped found the colony of Rhode Island. How many more women were there like her whose lives and deeds were never recorded?

The late, great Mary Lee Settle wrote, "Recorded history is wrong. It's wrong because the voiceless have no voice in it." So many people have been written out of history: not only the vast majority of women, but also people of the peasant and laboring classes, and most people of non-European ancestry. My goal, from my first novel onward, has been using fiction as a tool to rewrite women back into history and to give voice to the voiceless.

Why is The Vanishing Point set in this past? I was first inspired to write this book when I visited Philadelphia many years ago. On the tourist trail, I discovered a tiny row house where two 18th-century seamstresses once lived and plied their trade. I felt immediately drawn into their world. Even in that era, when nearly every factor of the dominant religion and economy herded women into marriage and domesticity, some women still succeeded in carving out independent, masterless lives. The idea of finding out the hidden history of these two seamstresses provided the initial inspiration for The Vanishing Point. I also wanted to use the book to explore the 17th century, which was one of the most dramatic periods of social transformation. I became intrigued by the idea of a late 17th-century woman who was determined to carve out her own destiny and who demanded the same liberties, both social and sexual, as a man. This was how May's character was conceived.

Do I think I will always write historical novels? I think I will continue to write them long into the future, because there are so many different periods of history that intrigue me. However, The Art of Memory, my current novel-in-progress, is contemporary, at least in part. Inspired by the 19th-century English gothic novel and pre-Raphaelite paintings, the book is a literary ghost story set in and around Manchester, England during the Industrial Revolution and the present day. The theme is that the past never dies—the souls lost in the tumult of historical progress and change keep haunting and exerting their influence on contemporary lives. 

Mary Sharratt: Your central character in Triangle, Esther Gottesfeld, has spent ninety years telling the story of how she escaped the Triangle fire, but she has never revealed the truth. Her granddaughter and the young woman's fiancé seek to untangle her story, as does Ruth Zion, a feminist historian with an agenda of her own. In your opinion, can anyone truly claim to understand the objective truth of an event when filtered through such oral history?

How reliable is memory, even if we do intend to tell the truth? How do you believe our perceptions and misperceptions about the past shape the present?

Katharine Weber: I think eyewitness accounts are essential for our understanding of history. That testimony, that bearing witness, those voices—that's how we really, deeply understand anything we know of human experience. The form that some of Triangle takes was very influenced by the Holocaust video archive at Yale (I knew the late Laurel Vlock, who founded that project). Those videotapes are
deeply moving. Part of what makes them so compelling is that in numeous cases that taped testimony was the only occasion for those survivors to tell their whole, complete story, and to feel truly heard.

In Triangle, everyone over a span of ninety years who hears Esther Gottesfeld's story of the day she didn't die in the Triangle Waist Company fire of 1911 has an agenda, which is revealed as they listen to her words, ask her questions, hear or read her answers, or sift through her personal effects. Our sense of the present is always seeking assurance and justification, always seeking reality checks from the past. What do we know, and how do we know what we know? The historian must prove his thesis with documented facts, while the novelist must convince his reader with authenticity, just enough reality, but not so much as to swamp the novel in facts and facts. The last thing I would ever want to hear from a reader is, "My, what a lot of research you must have done to write this novel."