Yay!  I can finally talk about something that definitely put an extra spring in my step last week.  Harper sold the audio rights for The Heroine’s Bookshelf to Blackstone Audio, the country’s largest independent producer of audiobooks!  This means that THB will be appearing in DRM-free CD and MP3 form in November…and that I get an inside view on the process of how a book gets from the page to the ear.

Here’s the deal report from PM *beam*:

March 5, 2010:  Audio rights
Erin Blakemore’s THE HEROINE’S BOOKSHELF, a look at literature’s greatest and most enduring female characters — such as Jo March, Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Bennet, Laura Ingalls and others — and their authors, who have helped shape the inner lives of generations of women, teasing out universal tenets of strength, wisdom, and survival, to Blackstone Audio, for publication in November 2010, by Janice Suguitan at Harper.

It’s Friday, and my Google Image Search obsession is as strong as ever.  Since Friday is a day for fun, I hereby bring you the first in a series of Friday blogs about covers of books included in The Heroine’s Bookshelf.  First installment:  Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, originally published in 1813.  Click to enlarge these gems!

From left to right, top to bottom:

1)  First, a bit of history.  Here’s the original front page (they didn’t do fancy artsy covers in the early 1800s).

2)  is kind of a swinging late 60sish take on P&P (reminds me of the exquisite Fairy Alphabet on Sesame Street).

3) has to be in the running for Lamest Cover Ever, right?

4) This illustration by Reuben Toledo brings a bit of fashion to Meryton.

5) and 6) Marvel recently put out a comic version of P&P that deserves two postings for its amazing covers by Sonny Liew.  I’ve included the first cover and the fourth.  Make sure to click to enlarge…they’re exquisite. 

7) Harper recently released a version of P&P styled after the Sparkly Vampire Series That Cannot Be Named…eek!

For another cool roundup of P&P covers, check out Belle of the Books’ recent post, which features tons of international Pride and Prejudice flava.

I have of course neglected to post the many, many covers that include a classic portrait of a woman on them.  Zzz.  What’s your favorite of these covers?  Got a favorite P&P cover you’d like to share?

This is the story of a woman whose work was lambasted as unchristian, immoral, anything but the work of an upstanding lady.  She was nervous in temperament and given to moody depression and moments of utter despair, sadness that the unfettered moors of her childhood home heightened.  She wore spectacles and had ruddy cheeks and a few missing teeth.  And she gave us Jane Eyre, another plain, poor woman who changed the world.

This was Charlotte Brontë, and she’s been on my mind recently for many reasons.

To me, reading is as immersive and essential as breathing, and there are some authors who are more than my favorite writers…they feel like my intimate friends.  Charlotte Brontë is one of those women, and she’s the subject of my first Heroine Mini-Series featuring three pivotal moments in her life.

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That shuffling scamp! Charlotte read the letter swiftly, taking in the news once, twice, until she could scarcely see for anger.  He had done it again.  Thomas Newby, the man who had published Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, was spreading a vicious rumor, this time in the United States.  Seeking to expand his fortune and capitalize off of the controversy surrounding Charlotte’s incendiary Jane Eyre, he had led the American publishing house Harpers to believe that the pen names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell all belonged to one person and that Jane Eyre, the American rights to which they had just bought, was in fact the work of one author instead of three.

That shuffling scamp! The Brontë sisters had never been ones to make public spectacles of themselves, but after the months of terrible reviews and public scrutiny, this was the last straw.  Charlotte and her sister Anne tromped four miles across unforgiving moorland, enduring a thunderstorm before falling into a carriage that carried them to London.  Barely rested and painfully aware of their countrified appearance in the midst of a bustling city, they sought out the offices of Smith, Elder.  Charlotte herself had carried on a years-long correspondence with her publisher, George Smith…under the pseudonym of Currer Bell.  And now his name, the name of the man who had fought for her book and brought it into the world, was being smeared an ocean away.

That shuffling scamp! Charlotte insisted, gently at first, more passionately when denied, that she must see Mr. Smith at once.  And there he was, “young, tall, gentlemanly,” stepping forward courteous and confused at the sight of these two thin, timid-looking women.  Charlotte thrust a letter into his hand, one he had addressed with his own hand to “Currer Bell, Esq.”  He started, sputtering.

“Where did you get this?”

“At the post office.  It was addressed to me.”  She let the words sink in before she continued.  “We have both come that you might have ocular proof that there are at least two of us.”

To be continued…

Wintry Colorado can be an unforgiving place, especially with single-digit temperatures and March (usually our snowiest month) still ahead.  I’ve got tea to warm my fingers, but my thoughts are turning to food…the kinds of food my literary heroines would have enjoyed.  This morning I saw an article featuring a Mock Cherry Pie (recipe below) attributed to none other than Lucy Maud Montgomery of Anne of Green Gables fame.  It made me wonder what other recipes actually attributed to “my” authors could be found online?

The yummy results follow.  Each is directly attributed to one of my favorite authors or one of her family members.  Also, how awful is it that I’ve given up sweets for Lent?  I know what I’ll be preparing Easter Sunday.

Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Mock Cherry Pie

Food fakery is a vital heroine skill.  Don’t have cherries?  Cranberries and raisins will do just as well!  This recipe is attributed to Maud, whose Marilla admonishes:  “You’ve got to keep your wits about you in cooking and not stop in the middle of things to let your thoughts rove all over creation.” (Prefer raspberry cordial or some other dishes mentioned in the Anne books?  This link’s for you.)

Pastry for a double-crust 9-inch pie
2 cups cranberries, chopped
1 cup raisins, chopped
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
2 tablespoons flour
1 cup cold water
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla

Line a 9-inch pie plate with half the pastry. Make a lattice crust with remaining dough.  In a saucepan, combine cranberries, raisins, sugar, flour and water; bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and let cool slightly. Stir in vanilla.  Turn filling into pastry-lined pie plate. Moisten edge with water and top with lattice crust.  Bake at 425 degrees F for 15 minutes. Reduce heat to 350 degrees F and bake another 20 to 30 minutes, or until crust is nicely browned and filling is bubbly. Serves six.

Louisa May Alcott’s Blancmange

Did you ever read Little Women and wonder, like me, what the heck blancmange is?  I am led to believe that it is a kind of sweet, white flan, as sweet and white as the plump hands of Meg March, whom I can imagine creating this blancmange and complaining over her unfashionable gowns.  You will recall that Jo brings a blancmange to Laurie when he is sick as a sort of wedge into his house and heart.  She succeeds.  This recipe is attributed to Abba Alcott, Louisa’s mother.

2 tbsp arrowroot
1 quart milk
1/2 cup sugar, more to taste
1 pinch salt
Something savory – orange water, rose water, or lemon peel

Take two tablespoonfuls of arrowroot to one quart of milk and a pinch of salt. Scald the milk, sweeten it with sugar to taste and then stir in the arrowroot, which must first be wet with some milk. Let it boil once. Orange water, rose water, or lemon peel can be used to flavor it. Pour it into molds to cool.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Gingerbread

Whenever I gain a pound, I blame Laura, whose description of crackling pig tails, bountiful pies, and tables laden with the goodness of hardy, sensible pioneer cooking are enough to drive any girl face-first into a pile of biscuits.  Though it’s easy to find recipes inspired by the Little House books, it’s harder to find ones directly attributed to Laura that aren’t protected by copyright.  Here’s one to start with:

1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup lard (fine, shortening will do)
1 cup molasses
2 tsp baking soda
1 cup boiling water
3 cups flour
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp allspice
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs

Blend brown sugar with lard.  Mix in molasses until well-coated.  Dissolve baking soda in boiling water (be sure cup is full of water after foam runs off into cake mixture).  Mix well.  In a separate bowl, mix flour with spices and salt.  Sift into wet mixture and mix well; mixture will be “quite thin.”  Finally, add two well-beaten eggs and bake in a moderate (350 degrees) for thirty minutes.

At the beginning of this whole entire process, I faced a nervewracking choice:  I wanted to write about great heroines of literature.  But did I want to limit my perspective to just female authors?

In the end, I decided yes and focused on heroine/author pairs whose qualities complimented or offset one another.  But with the same stroke, I cut out a whole set of incredible heroines written by men.  In apology, and in tribute, here are some of my faves:

• Mary Mackenzie – The Ginger Tree by Oswald Wynd:  This book was given to me by a friend who apparently knew my tastes inside and out.  Mary is a proper English girl who travels to China to fulfill an engagement to a man she barely knows.  Her slow liberation from a corseted existence and her torrid affair with a mysterious Japanese nobleman makes for gut-wrenching, page-turning reading.  Better yet, this book is epistolary (and pulls it off!) and deals with a facet of imperialism I had never thought of before.
• Lucy Honeychurch – A Room With a View by E.M. Forster:  Oh, A Room With a View.  I have watched your Merchant Ivory loveliness a million times, but I never really appreciated you before reading the book upon which you were based.  Lucy is annoying, flawed, and hopelessly muddled, and her story is easily one of my favorites ever.
• Matilda Wormwood – Matilda by Roald Dahl:  A reader, an adventurer, and a brave little soul, Matilda stands at the center of a book that completely galvanized eight-year-old me.  Her antics may be unrealistic, but her pluck and spunk aren’t.
• Anna Karenina – Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy:  You know those characters you love to hate?  This was a book I loved to hate…it just didn’t resonate with me the first time around.  But I gave it a second chance (somehow), and discovered a petty, selfish, insecure, nuanced, and miserable character in the lovely, corrupt Anna.  If you were forced to read this book in high school or college, consider giving it a second chance (I recommend the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation).

This is a woefully incomplete list, but it’s good to remember that women aren’t the only people who can write incredible heroines.  So…who’s on your list of favorite guy-authored heroines?

One of the most gratifying parts of writing The Heroine’s Bookshelf was discovering the backstories behind the women who wrote some of my favorite books.  And it wasn’t all fun and friends.  During the course of the book, I got to look at the underbelly of some of these women’s lives:  depression, chronic illness, opium addiction, adultery, even suicide.   And you know what?  I loved every minute.

Why embrace the serious sides of my literary heroines when many of them left such happy, pert, intelligent women as their legacy?  (Anne of Green Gables or Lizzie Bennet, anyone?)  Why not just focus on the picture they wanted to present to the world…the picture of the productive, happy writer who left her dirty laundry between two covers and moved on with life?

I was reminded of this question when reading this article about Louisa May Alcott and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dirty little opium secrets (or not-so-secrets, as the case may be).  For me, the answer is all about context.  When we look at the real lives of these writers, their accomplishments in the face of great trials and hardships are even more impressive.  Louisa May Alcott wrote her books in a state of constant, crushing financial worry…and if she hadn’t known what it was like to be poor, she could never have given us the image of four sisters sewing their way through dire straits and attempting to burden the load they must shoulder.  Could Charlotte Brontë have made Jane Eyre’s Lowood School so terrifying if she herself had not survived a similar experience?

Now that I know the backstory behind my favorite books, I feel even more grateful that these women took time out of their lives to give something to us, people they never met or even imagined.  Not that I subscribe to the thought that writers must be tortured (that’s probably material for a whole ‘nother post), but I think they’re at least allowed to be human.  When we deny a Jane Austen or a Frances Hodgson Burnett her humanity, we miss out on the rest of the story.

Now that the illustrious day has arrived, I can let the cat out of the bag:  My panel with fellow Laura fan and writer Wendy McClure, Loving Laura in a Lindsay Lohan World, has been accepted for the 2010 Laurapalooza Little House on the Prairie fan and academic convergence this July in Mankato, MN!  My inner Ingalls is doing a brisk jig.

In celebration of Laura, here are some fun facts about the mother of the Little House on the Prairie books:

• In her later years, Laura was notoriously frugal, probably because of the many years of disaster she endured both as a girl pioneer and as wife in a family plagued by economic and physical hardship.  When financial times got hard (the family lost much of their money in the stock market crash of 1929), a standard money-saving suggestion was to turn off the electricity.
• Laura was a fierce competitor and once declared that she would live to 90 because her husband, Almanzo, had.
• Laura wasn’t “just” a writer…she was a poultry and farming expert who was widely sought after for her advice and input on rural life.
• Rose Wilder Lane wasn’t Laura’s only child.  She had a son, never named, who died soon after his birth in 1889.
• When Laura’s books took off, she didn’t keep her earnings all to herself.  Instead, she sent several young people through college and provided for her parents in their old age.
• Laura was truly a “half-pint of cider half drunk up”…she stood four feet eleven inches tall.
• The Little House on the Prairie books were originally written as a long-form memoir for an adult audience, but Laura’s daughter Rose convinced her to try it for the children’s market after it failed to sell.  Laura’s sister Carrie apparently provided both moral support and supplemented Laura’s writing with her own memories.

There are some books you come back to again and again at different points in your life. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is that kind of book, so imagine my pleasure to see that Harper Perennial’s 2010 book club covered the book for January.

Writing a chapter on ATGIB and Betty Smith was one of the most challenging tasks ahead of me when I set out to write The Heroine’s Bookshelf.  It wasn’t just that Betty Smith’s life is so poorly documented overall, it’s that ATGIB is a tome, a weighty book with tons of moving parts.  It’s hard to wrap your brain around. Part of that, I think, is because it is a book of myriad intentions. Betty wrote it after an incredibly challenging childhood and adult life, from her roles as a tormented mother, a jilted wife, an uncomfortable harborer of desperate alcoholic men, and a sometimes quite literally starving artist.  She also wrote it as an advocate for the poor, a woman who worked for a radical WPA-sponsored theater project and who had gotten her education in poverty firsthand.  So I think it makes sense that the readings and comments I’m seeing are grappling with the book as a mother/daughter tale, a family drama, and a kind of anti-poverty social document.

Katie Nolan isn’t the main character of the book per se, but she becomes its core and its focal point, the woman who’s trying to hold her family together even as she drives it apart with her own desperation.  On my latest reread, I was astonished at how much nuance and pain Betty was able to give Katie.  Sometimes the book is physically hard to read.  You see Katie, her body broken and her life prospects completely dashed, covering up the hands that she’s used to drag her family through some semblance of life in shame, and you want to curl up in the fetal position or start drinking or something.  Except that that would never, ever fly with hard Katie.

For me, Katie’s uncompromising way of looking at the world pairs perfectly with Betty Smith’s mission in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn:  to make us look at the sordid, ugly, filthy sides of life alongside the beautiful and uplifting ones and to take all sides into our final reckoning.  And with so much nuance and pain, it’s no wonder I come back to the book I first read as a Francie-aged girl every few years, scared but hungry for Betty’s unvarnished look at life.

Today is the 197th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen’s immortal (so far) Pride and Prejudice, which is fittingly the very first book I dove into when writing The Heroine’s Bookshelf.  After all, what bibliophile in her right mind can really resist such a spirited, flawed, funny, sexy, and articulate heroine (and such an arch and fascinating authoress)?  In celebration of Lizzy Bennet’s debut into the literary world, here are some of my favorite links and factoids about the eternal P&P:

• Jane began writing Pride and Prejudice when she was just 21 years old.  The book was originally entitled First Impressions.
• Jane actually gave away the rights to her best-known book, selling them to publisher Thomas Egerton for just £110 (he argued her down from £150).
• Though witty and accomplished herself, Jane was more similar to her grumpy, outsiderish leading man, Fitzwilliam Darcy, than her sparkling female protagonist.
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the spoof spinoff from Quirk Books, has sold over 700,000 copies to date and spawned an entire series of spooftastic books related to classic literature.
• The 1995 Jennifer Ehle/Colin Firth adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is the best televised or filmed P&P incarnation, ever.  This is an incontrovertible fact.

Finally, here are two of my favorite P&P resources:  a detailed Pride and Prejudice character map (left), and Pride and Prejudice in Facebook form (right):

I’m done writing the book, but I can’t stop thinking about heroines and their particular pull.  I just read a great post by a dear friend about the power of heroines in young adult literature, even for thirtysomething women, and it reminds me once more that heroines matter, both for our adult selves and the childish ones we keep inside.

What is it about heroines?  Why do they exert such a seductive pull, calling me away from the dishes and the to-do list?

Here are some ideas:

• They’re not us: Heroines exist in a world outside of ourselves, something to escape into and crawl inside for a while.
• They are us: Heroines possess that which we ourselves have:  personalities, strong wills, the ability to adjust to circumstance.
• Possibilities and warnings: Heroines present another road, one in which we could do the mundane or the spectacular, transcending ourselves or destroying ourselves in the process.

How about you?  Why are heroines important to you?