Margaret Anne Doody - The
Writer
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My areas of academic expertise are Restoration and 18th-Century British
Literature and the Novel. Recent publications include: The True Story
of the Novel (an exploration of the history of the Novel from
antiquity to the present day); editions of Frances Burney's
Evelina, Jane Austen's Catherine and Other Early Writings,
and Anne of Green Gables (The Annotated Anne); an article on
"The Infant Samuel and Infant Piety" in Out of the Garden; "Gender,
Literature and Gendering Literature" in The Cambridge Companion to
English Literature 1650-1740; numerous reviews in London Review of
Books and TLS. The mystery novel, Aristotle Detective, has just
been republished and has also been translated into Italian. I am is
currently working on two non-fiction books, one on Apuleius and one on
Venice.
My recent work includes several articles dealing in various ways with
consciousness in fiction; I am becoming increasingly interested in the
idea of fictional "character" and in characterization. I also write
fiction of my own. My novel Aristotle Detective (first published in
1978) was translated into Italian in late 1999, and this event resurrected
by my fiction-writing career. It was such a "hit" in Italy that the
publishers Sellerio then published in book(let) form an Aristotle short
story ("Aristotle and the Fatal Javelin") and took from manuscript as the
never-before published sequel to Aristotle Detective (Aristotele
e la giuistizia poetica). (See article in "Repubblica-Palermo," 20
March; Interview in "Repubblica" April 4, 2001.) The Italian publications
attracted the attention of Greek publishers, and my "Aristotle" is now
hastening to appear in what may be thought of as "his own" language.
I have been working on the third full novel of my Aristotle series,
entitled Aristotle and the Mystery of Life. The "hit" I made in
Italy revived my fortunes in England. |
May 2003 |
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
1. When did you first want to
become a novelist?
At the age of 6, when I began my first–and first
unfinished–novel. This was entitled The Magic Skipping-Rope, and it
was historical. A little girl was given a magic skipping-rope for
Christmas, and in the spring when she started to jump with it, she was
transported to the world of 70 years ago. I had been fascinated by the
accounts of the life of my immediate ancestors on the farm where they ploughed
with oxen and made almost everything, not only patchwork quilts but their own
soap, and this vanished world was what I wanted to relive in my story.
(The Magic Skipping-Rope had only two chapters, and remained
suspended.)
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2. What was the initial success of Aristotle
Detective back in 1978–and why has there been such a long silence
between it and Aristotle and Poetic Justice?
Aristotle Detective came second in a Historical Novels contest
run by Bodley Head. It was published in England, and shortly
afterwards in America, by Harper and Row, also in American Penguin.
It was translated into French and German, and an abridgment in Italian was
published by Mondadori. “Aristotle” was always intended to be a
series and I thought I was well launched. I also published a short
story, “Aristotle and the Fatal Javelin” by invitation in a collection
published by Constable. But by the time I had completed the first
version of the second novel in 1982, my publishers had changed and also my
agent; nobody found a publisher and things just slid downhill.
I didn’t have the time to devote to trying to peddle my book—I was as very
much engaged at that time in my career as an academic. (In 1980 I
had moved from Berkeley to Princeton, as a Full Professor, and in 1989 I
moved to Vanderbilt University with an endowed chair.) It seemed
that I was not destined to be successful as an author of detective
fiction. So, my projected series remained a stately procession of
one for a long while. But I hardly thought of myself as “silent” for
I was published constantly–see answer to question 3, below.
The most dramatic part of the story is how I was rescued by
Italy. An Italian journalist named Beppe Benvenuto came upon the
Mondadori cut version, and told the publishers Sellerio (based in Palermo)
that they ought to publish an unabridged translation. Aristotele
detective appeared in Italy in 1999, and was so successful that
Sellerio published the short story as a small book (Aristotele e il
giavolotto fatale) and then (from the manuscript) a translation of the
sequel Aristotele e la giustizia poetica. These books have
been successful and popular, and I am now to my delight and surprise now
quite well known in Italy. I call Beppe my “resurrection man.”
And I owe a lot to the brilliant translator Rosalia Coci, with whom I am
now working on the translation of the next book in the series.
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3. Have you written any other books and are they
available?
I have published a number of other books, largely academic,
though another novel, The Alchemists, was published in England by
Bodley Head in 1980 and has just been published in Italy by Sellerio
as Gli alchimisti ( March 2002).
Academic books include
the following:
A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of
Samuel Richardson ( OUP 1974)
The Daring Muse: Augustan
Poetry Reconsidered ( Cambridge, 1985)
Frances Burney: The
Life in the Works ( Rutgers , NJ and Cambridge UP, 1996)
The
True Story of the Novel ( Rutgers UP, NJ and HarperCollins,
2000)
True Story should still be available. I have also edited a
good many works, including fiction by Frances Burney and Jane Austen, as
well as working with two other editors on The Annotated
Anne—an extensively annotated edition of L. M. Montgomery’s Anne
of Green Gables (Oxford, 1998) |
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4. Which authors have influenced you the most, and
why?
All sorts of authors have influenced me in different ways. Both Jane Austen
and Dickens are important to me, but also the major novelists both French and
English of the eighteenth century—especially Richardson, Swift, and
Voltaire. In my historical fiction, I acknowledge a deep debt to Walter
Scott, still the most profoundly impressive exponent of the art of the
historical novel. Scott at the core is not romantic, but has a very tough
view of human conflict. He has a strong political imagination,
and a part of my own imagination is always political. I am also influenced
by the Greek and Roman novels of antiquity–of a later date than Aristotle. When,
for example, in Aristotle Detective (chapter ), Stephanos is
walking through the labyrinth of Peiraieus back alleys and is
waylaid by Nousia, I know that I am consciously influenced by Petronius’
Satyricon. The description of burning Halikarnassos, however, in
Poetic Justice, owes something to Madeleine de Scudéry’s description of
the town on fire at the beginning of Artamène ou Le grand Cyrus, a
seventeenth-century historical novel, itself influenced by the ancient Greek and
Roman novels.
5. Why did you elect to write a whodunit , and what
made you choose this particular period of Greek history?
I have always loved detective stories. I
thought vaguely of writing one someday. But when the idea struck it crystallized
around Aristotle. I had been rereading Aristotle’s Rhetoric in preparation for a
meeting with a graduate student next day. I then rolled into bed with a
detective story, but still thinking of the Rhetoric, and the amazingly cool way
in which Aristotle recognized the evils of human nature. I thought idly
“Someone ought to write a detective story in which Aristotle is the Sherlock
Holmes.” During the next two weeks, I realized that “Someone” would not do
it, and that nobody would do it if I didn’t. The idea
increasingly took hold. I got great advice from Professor John
Gould, then Professor of Classics at the University College of Swansea
(University of Wales), where I was teaching at the time. And I always had
the right experts to turn to when I needed help with issues ranging from Greek
law to the construction and funding of warships.
Since I started with Aristotle at the center, of course I chose Athens along
with him. But I wanted not the idealized cool white marble Athens, but an
Athens in which people caught colds and had difficulty with relatives and
worried about debts. I hadn’t realized before I started writing the
first novel what a precarious and edgy time this was, as the wars of Alexander
were really spelling the end of what we know as the “classical age of
Greece.” It was a period far from calm—in fact, the turbulence and
stress of this period may resonate with elements of our own age. I think
this now even more emphatically than I did in 1976, when I was doing most of the
writing. I had a lovely hot summer for writing in. And living in
lovely Mumbles by the sea, I could walk around the point past an
eighteenth-century lighthouse, have a swim, and walk back down the hill to
continue working on my story. Those were good days! But my own personal
life had been disrupted by the breakup of a love relationship. (I am not
sure that such unhappy phases are not beneficial to writing.) And my life
was about to be further disrupted by the move to Berkeley University in
California, and what was to turn out to be permanent residence in the
USA.
6. What advice do you have for beginning writers?
Write!
7. Do you consider yourself a genre writer?
I would be happy enough to be called a “detective- story writer” or a
“mystery writer” or a “historical novelist.” But I really consider
myself to be just a writer.
8. What future books do we have to
look forward to ? Can you tell us anything about your next novel?
The next novel in the series is written and will be published by Century in
2003. It is called Aristotle and the Mystery of Life. This
novel draws on Aristotle’s scientific interests, and also sets Aristotle and
Stephanos traveling eastward, through he beautiful Cyclades and on to Kos and
the coast of Asia Minor. (To some of my favorite places, in
short.)
9. Do you have any plans for different books?
I think of writing another book that is not a
detective story, but I won’t say any more about that until it is done or nearly
done. There is another detective story in my bottom drawer–set in the
1750s, with the protagonist a Grub-Street hack.
10. When readers enjoy a book set in particular period they often
want to read others. Can you recommend any other books about this period of
history?
I don’t know any fiction about exactly this period in Athens. More
people have written about the age of Plato, which is different, and seen very
differently. Some readers might enjoy Mary Renault’s The Last of the
Wine. Others might like to try the first historical novel about
Alexander the great, known as the Alexander Romance —there is a good
version in English, edited by Richard Stoneman. It is not the purpose of
my works to romanticize Alexander or even to represent him. In my books,
Alexander is to be known through the swath he cuts, the wake of disruption, and
the effect of his wars on all sorts of persons.
11. Do you have any
final words for your readers, and how can fans contact you.
Anybody who wants to may write to my e-mail address: doody.1@nd.edu