00:00:45.420hello and welcome to vulgar history of feminist women's history comedy podcast my name is anne
00:01:03.300foster and today i've got sort of an early halloween adjacent author interview i'm talking
00:01:09.300today with heather redmond who's the author of death and the sisters a mary shelley mystery
00:01:15.100So it's the first book in a new trilogy of murder mysteries, imagining what if Mary Shelley and her stepsister, Claire Claremont, as teenagers, what if they solved a murder mystery?
00:01:27.560Which if you know me at all, you know that I am a huge fan of Claire Claremont.
00:01:35.040Mary Shelley, I respect greatly and I also enjoy her, but like Claire Claremont is my girl.
00:01:39.960And I was really excited that she's co-main character in this book.
00:01:43.580It's a Mary Shelley mystery, but to me, it's a Mary Shelley slash Claire Claremont mystery.
00:06:25.800You know, we don't have every letter they and their families wrote.
00:06:28.840We don't have every manuscript they wrote.
00:06:31.500We don't know what was going on in their daily life necessarily.
00:06:34.700So that's where I can fit in a mystery.
00:06:37.040and there's always with these enormous operatic type personalities questions of how did they
00:06:43.280become this way and so I'm answering those questions with my fictional story and in the end
00:06:51.060I create my Charles Dickens my Mary Shelley my Jane Claremont they aren't the real person they're
00:06:57.620my version but I'm personally as an accuracy fanatic comfortable with my version of the people
00:07:05.560And if I start to veer away, I make that clear in my notes, because, for instance, Charles Dickens never went to Newgate prison as an actual prisoner. He went as a reporter. But eventually, you know, that has to happen. And so I let people know in the notes.
00:07:23.640so with death and the sisters when you're looking at mary shelley and that what you explained just
00:07:29.620makes so much sense to me and what the book is like because i love that you're you're starting
00:07:34.000the book with a younger mary shelley you know before she runs off with percy shelley like
00:07:40.060while she's living at home with in this kind of family of half and step siblings and that was an
00:07:46.600era that i found really interesting and we don't know a lot about that time first of all i see
00:07:50.760that's the ideal place for you to put in a fictional story. But what sorts of things did
00:07:55.280you look at to try and imagine this era of her life where I think her papers, those are the
00:07:59.440ones they were lost, I think. So we don't really have her juvenilia. Exactly. Which is lucky for
00:08:04.620me in a way, but sad as a fan of her fiction, of course. So the Regency period is technically 1811
00:08:14.180to 1820, we look at the greater Regency period as the literary Regency. In the romance field,
00:08:21.800it is a hugely popular era. So there is a great deal of material out there, some of it more
00:08:28.380accurate than other material. And there's an idea of Georgette Heyer's Regency. She was a very well
00:08:36.540known author who continues to be beloved by at least writers of the genre. And she created her
00:08:43.460own version of the Regency, which she knew wasn't accurate. So you're dealing with all these
00:08:48.460different ideas of what 1811 to 1820 was. But in truth, it's probably the best research decade of
00:08:56.840the 19th century in England, just because of the fanaticism of the writers and readers in the
00:09:02.580romance genre. So I could start from a deep knowledge going back to 1995 of reading books
00:09:10.940and having a lot of friends and critique partners over the years who've focused on that.
00:09:15.660So I just have my own backstory to draw from and my own bookshelves and my friends' bookshelves
00:09:24.300But Mary Shelley just happened to be one of the lights of that era.
00:09:29.120If I look at my bookshelves going back to college, I have Frankenstein there.
00:09:32.860I have the collected books of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron, all of those people.
00:09:37.840so it's just been part of my landscape of my life for all these years and when you get into
00:09:48.5001814 and Mary Shelley that is the crucial few months of her life and her whole family because
00:09:55.620her actions destroyed her family in some ways so I am writing at this point a trilogy stretching from
00:10:03.920May to late July, 1814. And it's momentous in her life because as fans of Mary Shelley
00:10:12.460or Percy Bysshe Shelley know, they famously ran away together in July 28th, 1814. So I'm fitting
00:10:21.460those first three books in this series into that landscape. But it's also an incredibly important
00:10:28.200era in european history because that was the break in the napoleonic wars they think napoleon's been
00:10:35.520defeated they have no idea waterloo's coming in 1815 so um the congress of vienna is coming
00:10:42.820and all of these um celebrities of the other day i.e military leaders royalty nobility and so far
00:10:49.740are coming into london to celebrate so as i get deeper into this trilogy we get into
00:10:56.960their Royal Highnesses type people and what's going on in London, which is very exciting for
00:11:03.740an author because you get to have all the glittering pageantry. Like when you're writing
00:11:07.840Regency romance, you always need to have balls in there because people are looking for these
00:11:12.640glittering events. And Mary Shelley herself was the literary intelligentsia type. It's a different0.95
00:11:20.840scope, but because Percy Bysshe Shelley was the grandson of a baronet, her story has a little bit
00:11:26.840of bouncing up against those people. She had, she's seen the literary celebrities of her day
00:11:31.620because her parents were literary celebrities. Um, so people like Coleridge were just in her life
00:11:37.460as normal people. And then she's, um, can meet a few people like Byron because of Percy Bysshe Shelley,
00:11:46.420her lover being in the aristocracy himself. Speaking of Byron, um, well, this is my roundabout
00:11:53.040way to just find a way to talk about. So Mary's stepsister, Jane Claremont is her name that she
00:12:00.100goes by in this one, but she later changes her name to Claire Claremont. And listeners of this
00:12:05.080podcast will know that I have a real affection for her. And your book is called Death and the
00:12:10.020Sisters. So you've got both of their points of view, like Jane slash Claire. She's not just kind
00:12:15.920of there in the background. She's one of the main characters. She's half the book. She is. And I was
00:12:21.380so excited because I love her and she doesn't often get that much attention. So how did you
00:12:26.800come to the decision that it would be that you would have the two points of view?
00:12:30.740So in attempting to be as real as I know how to be based on what I know about these historical
00:12:36.620figures, Mary was a very closed off person. She felt greatly, she had huge intense emotions,
00:12:44.000but she had like a placid exterior and people would get completely the wrong idea about her
00:12:51.080through her whole life, I think, because she just didn't project her emotion into the world.
00:12:57.500So when I looked at Jane Claremont, who kept changing her name until she settled on Claire0.97
00:13:02.200Claremont, she's a big, boisterous, dramatic personality who has night terrors and hysterics0.99
00:13:09.700and dramatics and is being counseled on her personality flaws by Shelley in the biographical0.98
00:13:16.240details. So I thought, well, wouldn't it be interesting to have two points of view?
00:13:20.700So I address Jane in first person with all the drama of her personality, and then I switch to Mary in the third personality. I'm sorry, third person. So you kind of get the sense of remove with Mary, but you get the story more in technicolor in Jane's persona.
00:13:40.360i that's such a good description and that's also really how the book reads because you
00:13:45.860both of them are so different and i think you kind of to be investigating a murder you kind
00:13:53.360of need a jane claremont type to just sort of be more rash i guess um and just to be a bit more
00:14:00.120dramatic mary shelley i don't know i picture if actual mary shelley was investigating a murder0.99
00:14:04.960she would mostly just be, I don't know, thinking things to herself. Like you need somebody
00:14:09.900who's living out there like Jane. She'd be the person sitting in the chair,
00:14:15.140writing with her quill and sending her minions out to investigate. And there are figures like
00:14:21.880that in mystery. But what's pretty common these days is the very rash amateur sleuth who makes
00:14:28.600lots of terrible decisions and has no filter whatsoever. And that's kind of the standard
00:14:34.700with the cozy amateur sleuths in the mystery field today
00:24:40.560I imagined it as a trilogy in the sense of I knew I could only write so many books before July 28, 1814.
00:24:48.860It becomes a different setting once I get past that, because Mary and Jane ultimately run away from Skinner Street.
00:24:59.940Mary, despite the anarchist philosophy of her father, is not welcomed back into that house for a very long time.
00:25:08.360so we just have this set trilogy and then hopefully the series is popular and it continues
00:25:14.980but it wouldn't be set in skinner street anymore because mary wasn't living there
00:25:19.520it would be yeah i'm just picturing if the series goes on which i hope for you that it does um you
00:25:26.320know we've got her third time living in bath and all these different places where i'm sure things
00:25:31.680could come up but she would be like the fact that claire slash jane leaves with her means that both
00:25:36.760characters are together so you could continue on with the dual narratives as well yes they uh
00:25:42.720separated for periods of time they had an absolute frenemy love hate type situation and history does
00:25:49.620not record if it was in some way a menage a trois we just don't know i pitched the charles dickens
00:25:58.520series as leonardo dicaprio right before titanic that was how i saw charles dickens because i
00:26:04.760started the series in December, 1834, when he was young and struggling and hadn't yet become
00:26:11.140famous. So it came fast. I pitched this Mary Shelley world as the Rolling Stones and their
00:26:17.400women. So it's much more wild and crazy and drugs and sex and alcohol kind of thing. So just to give0.92
00:26:26.800you kind of that sense that I was going for the decadence, but because I'm that writer of becoming
00:26:32.100famous people. We're starting a little before that, though there's definitely some drama even
00:26:38.580in book one. In today's publishing landscape, when you have a narrator who's the age of Mary Shelley
00:26:45.920that could have also turned into a young adult novel, but then the events of her life are such
00:26:51.980like she runs off, she gets pregnant, like she loses a child. It's like they're very much the
00:26:55.480sorts of things that happen in adult novels. So I'm just curious if you had ever considered
00:27:02.080making this a book for younger readers or if it was always going to be for adults, just where her
00:27:06.220story. I think my editor expected things to be a little more gothic-y and dark and decadent.
00:27:14.360And what I explained was, as I just said, this is a becoming story. Mary hasn't yet lost a
00:27:21.560premature child. She hasn't yet had her husband drown. There are so many awful things. She,
00:27:30.020shortly after this, August of 2014, is walking through the battlefields of Napoleonic era
00:27:36.740France. Can you imagine the horror? I have walked around some of the Civil War battlefields
00:27:43.840here in the United States and how eerie it is to walk those even 150 years later. And she was
00:27:50.440walking there while there were still skeletons on the field and clothes and armaments and
00:27:56.340those kinds of experiences. And then being around Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was just a wild, dark,
00:28:06.020bipolar-type character, as we would describe today. He was doing chemical experiments. If
00:28:12.420you look at the character of Victor Frankenstein, there's a lot of Shelley in there with the
00:28:18.680obsessions and the wildness and the madness. And she was only just meeting him, probably.
00:28:25.040you know I start the book where he most likely met her it's possible they'd met two years earlier
00:28:30.380but you know you just go with the best thing you can as a writer so one one thing she did
00:28:37.560already know about that she'd had exposure to was chemistry which they called natural philosophy
00:28:43.560back then she had been taken to lectures so she did have the beginnings of some of the scientific
00:28:48.460background that would play into Frankenstein which is her first known novel the first surviving novel
00:28:53.660but a lot of the gothic horror-y type stuff that would darken a soul has not yet happened
00:29:00.740and in terms of the YA part I just wrote what I wrote and the publisher decides how to market it
00:29:08.500and they actually thought of it as less of a historical mystery and more of like a big book
00:29:14.140kind of idea that's why the cover is so dark and mysterious and has you know the disembodied woman
00:29:20.580on the cover because it's kind of a literary mystery idea of its own it's it's interesting to
00:29:28.920me just the the sorts of Mary Shelley is such a good example of this but just the the women I
00:29:33.860research for my podcast sometimes I think like oh this would be such an interesting book but then0.93
00:29:37.480it's like yeah but she was you know all these very adult things happen to this character when she's
00:29:43.280very young so you think like well that's not really you don't really want to write a book for
00:29:46.48012 year olds. That's about a 14 year old, not that Mary was, but I'm just thinking about people
00:29:51.600like Margaret Beaufort or something where it's just like, you don't really want to write a cute
00:29:55.460book about her teen, her teen era. Like you can't. Yeah. But so I think Mary Shelley herself,
00:30:02.660like people, I often forget how young she was when so much of this was happening to her. Like
00:30:07.680I think of her as a mature person. So it makes sense that it is an adult book.
00:30:12.240And that is one of the differences between Jane and Mary, that the sense of her from her contemporaries is that Jane was much less mature, not sexually awakened compared to Mary in summer of 1814.
00:30:28.160So you've got Mary losing her virginity, supposedly under the willows by her family's grave, while Jane was loitering oblivious, supposedly, you know, a few tens of feet away.
00:30:40.940and I try to fit that in the innocence of Jane versus the girl Mary who is a beauty who already
00:30:50.760had two suitors vying for her hand and just much more awakened to the relationships between men
00:30:56.280and women and yes it's a coming of age story but it's not necessarily one that you want a 14 year
00:31:02.840old girl reading but a 16 year old girl sure why not yeah yeah um and just to talk about Jane
00:31:09.980slash Claire again I think part of where and I'm excited to see what what she gets up to in the
00:31:14.700future books but yeah her whole character like especially once you know once they run away and
00:31:21.060then they like it just seems to me that Jane slash Claire was such an ordinary person like
00:31:28.820she would have been an interesting person in a normal sphere but she was in this extraordinary
00:31:34.460sphere with all these really interesting people. And she was desperate to be as interesting as they
00:31:40.100were. And she just wasn't, but she wanted to be. And I don't know, there's something really
00:31:45.100relatable about that. And when you describe it as like the Rolling Stones and they're women,
00:31:48.940I see her as this kind of groupie where you're just like, oh, like find your own thing. Like
00:31:57.640this isn't your world, but I don't know. I just, I have a lot of feelings about Jane slash Claire.
00:32:02.840This is an era of surplus women, because so many men died in the wars. And there is an absolute0.68
00:32:11.260parallel with the world of Charles Dickens. His wife, Catherine Hogarth, had a younger sister,
00:32:18.740and she came along with them. Basically, she was part of the baggage of Catherine Hogarth's life.
00:32:25.640And Jane Claremont is the same way. She's the baggage of slightly older Mary's life.
00:32:30.420but the thing with Jane in real life is as things began she didn't have the sexual relationship0.98
00:32:38.860with Shelly but she was kind of a best friend figure um Mary started having lots of pregnancies
00:32:46.120and Jane was the one that was palling along with Shelly she was the one who was staying up all night
00:32:51.100with Shelly because Mary was pregnant and ill and resting so in that moment of real life
00:32:59.840who can say how they really all felt about each other. This was a mistress, not a wife for Mary
00:33:06.280at the beginning. And Jane took a lot of Shelley's time. Mary was very jealous of that. And also,1.00
00:33:13.300Jane thought she was going to be a novelist too. My conceit in my books is that Jane considers
00:33:19.320herself the real heir to Mary Wollstonecraft. She's the anarchist. She's the atheist. She's0.84
00:33:26.720the free thinker. She's the free love believer and marries the conventional one. So she is very0.96
00:33:35.340much a heroine in her own mind, even though we know what happened. Her only book that we know
00:33:40.840she wrote did not get published. It has disappeared to time. She's just known as a letter writer and
00:33:47.800mostly she's known for the opinions of her great old age, which are probably not remotely what her
00:33:52.620opinions were. We also see her through the eyes of Saturnine Lord Byron, who hated her,
00:34:00.360but also said that if an 18-year-old girl is going to prance toward him, that of course he0.99
00:34:05.560was going to have sex with her. So he diminishes this big personality to a prancing 18-year-old0.99
00:34:13.620girl, just some kind of, you know, 1814 horndog type. So it's, it's unfair, but at 1814, her story
00:34:24.260is unwritten and I doubt she knew she wasn't the heroine of her own story. Yeah. So that's what's
00:34:31.680such a really interesting era, especially this first book and what's going to be this trilogy
00:34:36.900where none of them know what the future holds for themselves or for each other. And it's just
00:34:41.860sort of full of possibilities. And that's really interesting. I certainly think so.
00:34:47.540Yeah. So when this podcast comes out, your book will have been just published. So do you have
00:34:54.380plans for, are you going to be doing a big book launch event or things like that?
00:34:59.740So on September 26th, which is the release date, I'm doing a live podcast and I can't remember
00:35:07.680which one it is because I just booked it. But I'll be getting up first thing like 830 that
00:35:12.740morning, my time being on a live show. And then at 7pm that night, I'm doing another live show.
00:35:18.780And I know that one is vintage hyphen books.com. You can go there to get details. So that is that
00:35:25.200day. And then on October 2, which is a Monday, I'm going up to the University of Washington
00:35:31.280bookstore in Seattle and the University of Washington is my alma mater. And this is the
00:35:35.660first time I'll ever be talking at the main bookstore where I even worked a little bit
00:35:41.300back in the 80s. So it's a very cool moment. They've had me at the satellites, but they've
00:35:45.760never had me at the main bookstore before. I grew up within walking distance of it. So that's my
00:35:50.880big moment. But other than that, my big trip for the year was going to where I was born, Chicago,
00:35:57.040to the American Library Association conference. And I was speaking at different stages throughout
00:36:03.500this massive conference and selling the book to libraries, it comes out in hardback. And anytime
00:36:08.680you have a hardback in publishing, your libraries are your biggest customers and your most important
00:36:14.260customers. So that already happened because you're trying to get the librarians to read the
00:36:19.980book ahead of time and order it in. I also think the timing is also, and I'm sure this was
00:36:24.780intentional, but it's coming out towards the end of September. And although your book, as you said,
00:36:28.720it's not getting into Mary Shelley's goth phase. People always think of her that way. So I think
00:36:35.060the fact it should be in bookstores, but around Halloween, I think it would be good in display,
00:36:40.720you know, that was a deliberate choice. My Dickens books had most recently been coming
00:36:46.180out right before Halloween. So they moved this book up a month so that it could catch that
00:36:51.680Halloween market. And even though Mary is perhaps not yet the goth we would expect her to be,
00:36:57.240this is a perfect Halloween book because it is set in the neighborhood of prisons. So all around
00:37:03.680Mary are prisons, Newgate prison, hangings are in the book. It is a very gritty time period. And
00:37:12.680she was living in a very gritty part of London. It's a very rich and poor mixed up kind of city
00:37:21.080in this time. And she was living near a major slum. She was living near the animal slaughter0.58
00:37:27.080houses of Smithfield market in addition to the prisons. So it is definitely an atmospheric
00:37:33.480cemetery kind of book. No, absolutely. So thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me
00:37:42.420about this book. As I said, it combined three of my favorite things, which are murder mysteries,
00:37:48.220Claire Claremont and history. So I was, I was excited to read the book and I was happy to
00:37:54.480talk to you so other people can know about it. Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoy
00:37:59.320the interviews you do as well as the deep dive history on famous women. It's just been a joy to
00:38:04.460listen to your podcast. And as you know, I love your name. I always hear it because my son is
00:38:09.860descended from another famous Ann Foster. Tell everybody actually with the Halloween vibes,
00:38:15.500who's the other Ann Foster? So Ann Alcock Foster was one of the people who was mixed into the0.90
00:38:24.020Salem Witch Trials. She actually died in prison. You could say that she died trying to save her
00:38:30.400family because one of her daughters was also arrested as a witch. So she's just a very tragic
00:38:37.840figure, possibly not one of the more famous witches of the Salem Witch Trials, but nonetheless,
00:38:43.480she was there and she died in prison. Just very tragic and is a direct ancestor of my husband's
00:38:49.980family. I just want to say I first heard, I don't know, I first heard about other Ann Foster,
00:38:57.560previous Ann Foster, when I was studying the Crucible when I was in school. But then since
00:39:04.080then, you know, and since I'm doing the podcast and everything, sometimes when you Google your
00:39:07.980own name, other Ann Foster still tends to come up first. She has a Wikipedia page and I don't,
00:39:14.160which is fine. She deserves it. I'm fine having her be the top search result for Ann Foster.
00:39:19.980she, she deserves it. Yeah. Well, it is an amazing thing to know that someone who died in 1694
00:39:27.700is still that famous. Yeah. Well, and hopefully I, I don't know. And you had asked, the first
00:39:34.000thing you asked me was if I considered doing a podcast episode about Anne Alcock Foster. And I,
00:39:38.420I have, and I probably will at some point, but that I loved that you have a family connection.
00:39:43.280Well, thank you again so much for taking the time to talk to me today.