Emma Donoghue at Oscar Wilde in NYC

On Friday I drove into the city to see a wonderful author, Emma Donoghue at Oscar Wilde Bookshop. She is the author of Slammerkin (Born to poverty in eighteenth-century London, Mary Saunders' love of fine clothes and a dream of a better life take her from the world of prostitution to life as a household seamstress in Monmouth to a search for true freedom) The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (Donoghue finds her inspiration for these wry, robust tales in obscure scraps of historical records: an engraving of a woman giving birth to rabbits; a plague ballad; surgical case notes; theological pamphlets; an articulated skeleton. Here kings, surgeons, soldiers, and ladies of leisure rub shoulders with cross-dressers, cult leaders, poisoners, and arsonists) and the brand new Sealed Letter (Emily "Fido" Faithfull, a spinster pioneer in the British women's movement, is distracted from her cause by the details of her friend's failing marriage and affair with a young army officer, in this drama of friends, lovers, and divorce, Victorian style). She read from the Sealed Letter with a lovely Irish accent and a dramatic flair. After, the audience asked her the ususal questions: Who do you like to read? (Terry Pratchet, Sarah Waters). Are you writing something new? (Yes) What do you prefer, contemporary fiction or historical fiction? ("I have two woman in my life ... genre-wise"). Will you sign my book? (Yes!)

Other than the fact that Emma is a wonderful writer, what I love most about her is that she uses these strange little nuggets from history and creates entire books around them. The Sealed Letter is based on an actual Victorian divorce case that was in all the newspapers and was quite shocking for the time. She also sprinkles her books with fabulous words from the period (hugger-mugger, pettifoggery, chicanery) that adds an authentic feel to the drama.

Emma is back in Canada now, hopefully working hard on her next book. Until then, pick up one of her novels, short story collections, retold fairy tales, plays or literary histories and anthologies.