Threads of Beauty and Feminism in Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese

Join me as chat with Laurie Lico Albanese, author of three novels listed on Art In FIction, including Hester listed in the Textile Arts category and Stolen Beauty and The Miracles of Prato (co-written with Laura Morowitz) listed in the Visual Arts category on Art In Fiction.

View the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/vUuYVDmYdDQ

• Inspiration for Hester
• Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and its relationship to Hester: who was the real Hester Prynne?
• Why the novel is not about a love affair between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller
• How Isobel Gamble's story is similar to Hester Prynne's, and how it is different
• Synthesthesia in Hester and how it informs the gorgeous descriptive writing
• Why the category for Hester changed from Literature to Textile Arts
• Embroidery as a feminist act
• How women and men view the future
• The hero's journey vs. the heroine's journey
• Nathaniel Hawthorne had his issues
• Reading from Hester
• Witchcraft and slavery in Hester
• The theme of Hester
• One thing Laurie learned from writing her novels that she didn't know before

Press Play now & be sure to check out Laurie Lico Albanese's novels on Art In Fiction: https://www.artinfiction.com/novels?q=albanese

Laurie Lico Albanese's website: https://www.laurielicoalbanese.com/

Music Credit
Paganology, performed by The Paul Plimley Trio; composed by Gregg Simpson

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Transcript

Hello and welcome. I'm Carol Cram, host of The Art In Fiction Podcast. This episode features Laurie Lico Albanese, author of Hester listed in the Textile Arts category on Art In Fiction, and Stolen Beauty listed in the Visual Arts category. Her co-written novel with art historian Laura Morowitz is The Miracles of Prato, which is also listed in the Visual Arts category on Art In Fiction.

Laurie Lico Albanese has published fiction, poetry, journalism, travel writing, creative nonfiction, and memoir. She is married to a publishing executive and is the mother of two children. 

Carol M. Cram

Welcome to The Art In Fiction Podcast, Laurie. 

Laurie Lico Albanese

Thank you. Nice to be here. 

Carol M. Cram

First off, I've got to say how much I enjoyed reading Hester. Your writing is gorgeous, for one thing. What inspired you to write the novel? 

Laurie Lico Albanese

Oh, I mean, I love that question. So, you know, you're Canadian. Did you read The Scarlet Letter in high school? 

Carol M. Cram

No, I have read it, many years ago, but not in high school. It wasn't part of our curriculum. 

Laurie Lico Albanese

So, it was a required reading when I was in high school, and I wrote my first research paper on Pearl, actually, who is Hester's daughter, when I was in high school. And then I had just finished my prior novel, Stolen Beauty, and I was thinking, what did I want to write? And, my husband's in publishing, he used to work for Harper Collins, now he works for Abrams, and we went for a walk in the park, and I knew that I wanted, because I had already written two historical novels that featured paintings, and I wanted to do something that involved the creative process, but I thought it would be fun to do something different.

So, we were walking along, and I just literally said, what about who was the real Hester Prynne?

So, it was a great, clean, simple question, Carol, you know. What if there was a real Hester Prynne and what if she could tell her own story. So, that's the short answer of where I got the idea is, I just love the idea of a retelling from someone's point of view who hasn't been heard from, sort of like James that we've heard recently, you know, or there's a new one someone just told me about, Julia, which is the character from 1984. 

Carol M. Cram

Oh, of course. That’s a good one. 

Laurie Lico Albanese

And James by Percival Everett was fantastic. And I actually read Jean Rees‘ The Wide Sargasso Sea, which is, you know, sort of a retelling of Jane Eyre, but from Jane Eyre's wife's colonialist past point of view.  I mean, there was a lot that came after that, but that was the genesis. That was the seed. 

Carol M. Cram

Yes. Actually, I love that idea as an author myself is, looking for some of these characters. But I hadn't really thought about it when I was reading your novel, but, yeah, that's a great idea. 

Laurie Lico Albanese

In the end, I invent a character, but the idea went through a few incarnations before I arrived at that one. One of them, at first, I thought I would write the way James is written, which is from the fictional character's point of view, so that Hester Prynne from the 1600s novel would get to tell her version of the events. But that was pretty dry, actually. And Hawthorne had already done it; he'd already written things in the 17th century.

It was a gray Puritan time; terrible things were done to women. And I couldn't really make her come alive in that incarnation. So, then the next thing I did is I did a lot of research into the life of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and I found out that one of the inspirations that's been talked about is that Margaret Fuller, the early American feminist, could have been the inspiration for Hester Prynne.

And actually, Alison Pataki, who just wrote the novel Finding Margaret Fuller, says in her book that Margaret Fuller's early death as a feminist, and disgrace after having a child out of wedlock, is what influenced him, but I don't take that tack, obviously. So, I read about Hawthorne's life, but I did spend a good amount of time, like a year, writing a novel in which Nathaniel Hawthorne, the real person, has a love affair with Margaret Fuller, the real person.

And what happened with that, it was going along grandly, until I couldn't make them get into bed together. I just didn't believe it, you know, I couldn't, and Margaret Fuller was a real person, and she was famously America's famous virgin. And I was just, like, I can't do that, because I write books, my last books have all been about real people and imaginary things that they go through, but there's always plausibility and possibility. I don't write anything that's not plausible or possible. And so, when I couldn't make them get into bed together, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller, I had to come up with another idea. 

Carol M. Cram

Oh, that's a heck of a zigzag that you had to do after a whole year's worth of work. That must have taken a lot of courage to put that aside and then start a new one. 

Laurie Lico Albanese

I seem to be the queen of that, you know, I don't know. That's not the first one and it's not the last one that I've sort of done that with. But that was a big shift. That was a really big shift, but I had no choice, you know, I really didn't.

And I spent some more time with Margaret Fuller, but in the end, she was a hard story to tell. I think Alison did a good job with that.

Carol M. Cram

I know it's on my list to read Alison's book. I'd love to get her on the podcast. That novel is on Art In Fiction as well. 

So, Isobel Gamble, your wonderful main character Isobel Gamble, is just fabulous. I mean, it's really her story far more than Nathaniel Hawthorne's, isn't it? 

Laurie Lico Albanese

Yes. 

Carol M. Cram

I was way more invested in Isobel than Hawthorne, who of course doesn't come off all that well. How is her story similar to Hester Prynne's, and how is she different? 

Laurie Lico Albanese

Oh, well, that's a great question. So, well, The Scarlet Letter, for anyone who doesn't recall, so, it was published in 1850. I mean, a lot of younger people haven't read it, actually. You don't have to read The Scarlet Letter or reread it, God forbid, don't do homework before you read Hester. 

So, Hester Prynne arrives in America without her husband and spends two years in America, in Boston, without her husband, and when the novel opens, she has just been released from jail and she's holding a newborn baby and she has this red A, embroidered A, for “adulterous” on her dress, which, you know, really was a mercy because they used to brand women with an A on their chest or whatever. Terrible things. The Puritans were horrible. No surprise there. 

So, Hester Prynne has a child out of wedlock, and then her husband comes back, and then she has a series of calamitous events. They try to take her child away from her. So, the way that Isobel Gamble is like Hester is that Isobel Gamble also has, you know, a child out of wedlock, but that's a little bit of a spoiler, right?

And the other thing that's really important is that Hester Prynne is an embroiderer. And Hester Prynne, who's been stamped with this red A for adultery and cancelled in today's parlance, right? And kicked out of town and told to go live out in the forest somewhere. Hester Prynne is so talented with the needle that they all come find her and pay her to do their embroidery.

So when I was re-reading The Scarlet Letter for my novel, I wanted to know why would people who were told that she was a disgrace, to stay away from her, you know, she was the devil's spawn, basically go and spend their money and have her do their needlework for them when everyone and their daughter and their mother from the queen to the lowliest peasant knew how to sew and knew how to embroider.

So, I thought she must have had some really special gift. And when you read Hawthorne's version of Hester, he doesn't explain it. He just says that her work is spectacular, ten times more beautiful than anyone else's. So I thought, well, maybe she's psychotic. And I quickly decided I didn't want to do that.

And then I knew because I'd had a student who had synesthesia. So, for people who don't know synesthesia, I do describe it in the first pages of the book in a little intro before the book, a reader's note. Synesthesia is when people have their senses mixed up, like you might taste colors. Or smell music and so in Isobel’s case, she sees letters in color and that is actually one of the most common forms of synesthesia.

A is a red letter, B is a blue letter, kind of like if you had those refrigerator magnets when you were a kid, A was always red, B was always blue, C was always yellow. And it's interesting because that is the exact colors that most people with that form of synesthesia will see. Isobel does have it; Hester Prynne does not have it. 

Carol M. Cram

Yeah, so actually you've already answered a few of my questions that I was just going to ask. That's great. I originally had the novel listed in the Literature category because of the connection to Nathaniel Hawthorne, but then I read it.

And I moved it into the Textile Arts category on Art in Fiction. Because it's really the story of, as you said before we started the podcast, stitching as a feminist act. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that because I just adored that so much. 

Laurie Lico Albanese

Yeah. I actually really loved everything that I got to research about that, everything I got to do.

So, one of the things that's really important, as I said, in The Scarlet Letter, so Hester Prynne is abandoned, her husband's sort of her secret enemy, and she's raising her daughter and how is she going to feed herself? So, she's making her way with embroidery. And what I started to think about with her, what I started to think about with Isobel, when I decided that Isobel, my Hester, if you will, had synesthesia, is that she has a gift, but that is also a curse. So that was the first thing I started with when I started with the embroidery. A gift that is a curse, a curse that is a gift. And I think, you know, that that's a kind of interesting tension that a lot of creative people can identify with and a lot of people.

So, you're an extrovert, but people think you talk too much. You're a good listener, but people think you're dull. Like, sometimes the thing that's best about you can also feel like the thing that's worst about you. So I was really interested in that.

So, the novel Hester takes place in 1829 in Salem. And women don't have really any agency, which is of course the history of women, right? We don't have any agency. Oh, yes. Right. Yeah. So, it's just before sort of the industrial revolution. And so fabric is just becoming something that's going to be made in factories.

And we have, when we meet our little protagonist when she's a child. Her mother has died, Isobel Gamble's mother has died, and she is working in a little factory where she's doing white on white embroidery. So, she and these other young girls, because they need tiny little hands to do their tiny little white on white embroidery, they're working for a man.

They're working for the man, right? And my story in many ways was about how Isobel takes this thing that people are always trying to take away from her, or co-opt from her, or make money off of her with, and it's not just men, right, in the story she has a great antagonist, not the biggest antagonist, but she has a shop owner, and a shop owner who's a woman who's basically taking advantage of her great skill. 

And the thing that I did when I was working on the book is I read a lot about the beginning of female independence as shop owners because they're, even when I first thought of the book, Carol, when I first started thinking about what is my Isobel Gamble, when I first finally arrived on this Scottish immigrant, what does she want?

And I thought she wants to make patterns and be a dressmaker and be a designer and be an embroiderer. And, you know, to have her own business. As a 21st century woman, I thought, oh, well, that's just so unfeminist, you know, but so then I spent a lot of my time researching, understanding, what did it mean to have this gift.

And one of the things I also found out is that embroidery was really important. It was dressmaking. It was adornment. Everyone used embroidery. And as these things became mechanized and the industrial revolution came along, women got sidelined and they became crafts. You know, now embroidery is a craft, and we can kind of look at it askance.

But it was really important then, and I wanted it to be something that she could claim and stake her independence on. So, I'm really glad that you picked that up because that to me was really important. 

Carol M. Cram

Well, it's interesting, because when I started Art In Fiction, I actually had a category called Craft. And a friend of mine who is a textile artist, she says, no, no, no, no, you can't do that. You  are denigrating women's work. So therefore, I divided it. I have Decorative Arts and Textile Arts, because of course, they're arts. And it was because they're so-called women's arts, they were marginalized.

Laurie Lico Albanese

And it was because of embroidery that Isobel finally gets some agency in the novel. I have this book here that I read. It's called The Subversive Stitch, and it's by Rebecca Parker, and the subtitle is Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine.

So, any of the ideas that I got, this was, like, second wave feminism in the 1970s. and she talks about Judy Chicago. So, I went to the Brooklyn museum. I'm in New Jersey outside of Manhattan. And so Judy Chicago made this famous tapestry called The Dinner Party where she gives each woman and a lot of biblical women, by the way, a tapestry. A seat at the table, meant to be literal and metaphorical. And she does it with tapestry arts, and she's a fine artist. So I love that.

Carol M. Cram

Oh, it's a wonderful piece. I remember it well when it came out. I still haven't seen it, so next time I go to New York, I will, definitely. 

So, one of the things I enjoyed about Isobel, one of the many things, is she comments, because you know, it's written in the first person, on the role of men and women, and I actually wanted to read one of my favorite lines that Isabel says towards the beginning of her affair with Nathaniel Hawthorne. It was such a great line, I had to, like, pause the audiobook and write it down. 

Laurie Lico Albanese

Oh, that's great because you listen to the audio, right?

Carol M. Cram

Yes, so these are the essentially, yeah, two lines.

So, I'm going to read them and then I'd like to get your take on it. 

Why do men bind themselves to a flag and a nation while women bind themselves to passion and love? Why do men fixate on the past when every woman I've ever known is trying to remedy the present while she builds hope for what is to come?

Wow. Oh, that is so insightful. I caught my breath. Oh my god, what a great line. And it's so true. Well, so tell us about that. 

Laurie Lico Albanese

I was writing this during the pandemic. So that was also during the last presidency. And, you know, I was thinking a lot about, and I don't mean Biden's, I was thinking a lot.

Carol M. Cram

Right, right, right. 

Laurie Lico Albanese

I was thinking a lot about nation building, I think. I mean, I'm interested in this in general. Obviously, any woman with an ounce of feminist bent in her is thinking about what do men value and what does a patriarchal society value versus what do women, and, if we could have a matriarchal society, what do women value.

And it seems so obvious that it's almost not worth restating, but you know, women, and this is in the book, literally women value the company of other women and cooperation, right? And the creation of something. And I think in the end, men can't stand that women are the creators of life or, not all men, you know, right.

Of course, your husband's a painter. He's probably very enlightened. My husband's but men value power and it's just like the hero's journey versus the heroine's journey. You know what I'm talking about with that, right? So, you know, the hero's journey is, go out, get a sword, charge to the top of the hill, chop off a lot of heads, get the ring, bring it home, you know, bravo, I've conquered everything.

And the woman's narrative, what was her name? Maureen Murdoch. She wrote the heroine's journey. And she talked about, and I've actually tried pegging some of my novels to it, that the woman's journey, the heroine's journey, is first separation from the mother, identification with the father, and then a period of wandering and being lost and kind of going into a darker spiral.

I'm having to think about it pretty hard. And if you remember it otherwise, please correct me. 

Carol M. Cram

Yeah, I have to read that, actually, because what you're saying is exactly what my current novel's about, so that's a good reminder to read Murdoch. 

Laurie Lico Albanese

A woman searches. She doesn't go out and conquer. And even if she's a conqueror, she does it from a place inside, whereas men are more external, the whole yin yang.

I mean, you can appropriate any culture's words for what we're talking about, right? And so I was trying to get to that a little bit in the novel. And of course, Nathaniel Hawthorne, in my book, so I will say, there is a woman who I really admire. She's passed away now, but Louise DeSalvo, and she's a scholar, and she was a Virginia Woolf scholar and a memoirist, but she'd written a little book about Hawthorne when I first had lunch with her in Montclair, and I said I had this idea for a book.

Can we curse on your podcast? 

Carol M. Cram

Of course. 

Laurie Lico Albanese

Yeah, she said, oh my God, Nathaniel Hawthorne, what a son of a bitch. And I just kind of wrote that on a little note card and put it in front of me because, and actually I interviewed scholars, I interviewed some scholars and historians in Salem.

And this one woman said to me, be very careful. Don't make Nathaniel Hawthorne nice. Because he wasn't. So, you know, I kind of liked the idea of taking down one of our old guards just enough to show that he was sexist. And, by the way, he has an affair with a married woman. And from what we know about life from where we're sitting now, not ingenues in our twenties or thirties, we know that men will behave a certain way.

I mean, in my mind, he behaves like a cad to her, but he also behaves exactly as he would. I could believe that of a man today, exactly the same. 

Carol M. Cram

The thing that got me, and maybe it's a little bit of a spoiler, but just how he kept accusing her really of you bewitched me. Oh yeah. So, it's your fault.

Laurie Lico Albanese

Well, I was really interested in that. You know, I mean, I was interested in the idea that calling someone a bitch and calling someone a witch is just the same thing that we've done forever. Just one letter different that the men have done forever. And so, they were women. 

Carol M. Cram

Uppity women. 

Laurie Lico Albanese

Yeah, right, uppity women. Right. Excuse me, I'm speaking. Or I thought about it, even in my last book, because Adele Block Bauer, who was the heroine in Stolen Beauty, she was considered to be a very difficult kind of bitchy woman. And when I first wrote her, she was kind of that way on the page. And my agent said, you have to make her more likable.

And I started thinking about Hillary Clinton actually, and how people said she was a difficult woman, but really, she was just a really smart woman who knew what she wanted and knew how to go get it. And even if a person is a difficult person, they never think, oh, I'm a terrible bitch, they think that they're misunderstood or, you know, so I had some fun with that as well.

Carol M. Cram

Yes. Yeah, I know it's interesting how a strong woman is supposed to be a bitch, but a strong man, that's okay. Yeah, this is a very timely novel even though it came out in 2022, right? But it's extremely timely. 

Laurie Lico Albanese

Yeah, so thank you for talking to me about it now, almost two years later.

Carol M. Cram

Yes, especially with what's happening right now. And I just want to circle back to synesthesia, which is not something I'd actually heard of. But what I loved about your use of that as an author is all the excuses it gave you to use your language for your description. Your description of color is fantastic.

So, did you know that was going to happen when you decided to give her this condition of synesthesia? It was kind of amazing. 

Laurie Lico Albanese

You know, I like my novels, obviously art in fiction, right? I like my novels to have an element of creativity in them. And what I really like is to have an element of color.

I feel like writing is such a black and white endeavor, like, you're on your laptop or you're just looking down at your notebook and it's black and white or even a book is black and white. And I wanted to be thinking about color. I really like color. I made a little watercolor painting this afternoon.

And I wanted to be writing about color. So, I didn't know, but synesthesia was sort of the gift that kept on giving.

Carol M. Cram

I really felt that, because at the beginning, you mentioned it, but you, as a reader, you don't really know how it's going to manifest in the novel. And just the way it just keeps coming back subtly every so often, as I said, the different ways you've described color, like all the different words you had for how Isobel would describe blue, like robin's egg blue, or I don't know, there were so many different ones. I was always like, wow, those are some great adjectives. 

Laurie Lico Albanese

Yeah, I bought some books on color and pigment and, you know, if you're painting your house and there are all these different names for colors. I mean, I love that. I feel like I could get a job doing that. 

Carol M. Cram

Well, it was great. I really enjoyed that. That was fun. 

Laurie Lico Albanese

It was fun. So, thank you. 

Carol M. Cram

So, would you like to do a reading now from Hester? 

Laurie Lico Albanese

Sure. Yeah, I would love to. I think I'll read right from the beginning. 

So, 

Salem was meant to be a new beginning. A place where the sharp scent of cinnamon and tea perfumed the air with hope. A place where the colors could be safe and alive in me. I was 19 years old, and Nathaniel Hawthorne was 24 when we met on those brick streets. His fingers were ink stained. He was shy but handsome.

The year was 1829 and we were each in our own way struggling to be free. He with his notebooks, I with my needle. Some people will tell you that Nat spent the better part of a decade after Bowdoin College alone in his room learning how to write, but that isn't fabrication meant for the ages. The true story of how he found his scarlet letter, and then made it larger than life, begins when I was a child in Scotland, and he was a fatherless boy writing poetry that yearned and mourned.

Sometimes, I still picture him in my mind, a lonely nine-year-old boy with a bad limp and a mop of dark hair, standing at the edge of the Massachusetts Bay, waiting for a ship. He knows that his father has died of yellow fever somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, yet the boy is waiting with pencil at the ready.

Something in him knows, I believe this, even after all this time, that although his father will never return, a story just as powerful is coming toward him. And it is me, bent into the wind, fleeing home with my colors in my needle and my own set of needs and dreams. It is me with my red letter secreted away.

Like all the women in my family, I was born in a stone cottage in the town of Abington, beside the River Clyde. I had red hair and green blue eyes and was named Isobel for my grandmother, just as my mother was named Margaret for her grandmother. For hundreds of years, we've been Isobel Margaret, Isobel Margaret, a chain of women going back and back through time, mom said, and I liked the way it sounded.

All of us red haired girls stitched together like paper dolls. I lived in a world of magic and color then. My mother's voice a sapphire stream flecked with emeralds. My father's a soft caramel. In summer, I ran barefoot through the valleys with my cousins and kin and saw their voices rise up in vibrant wisps of yellow and gold.

The wind was sometimes fierce pink, and the sound of the waterfall on rocks glistened silver. I didn't know my colors were unusual, and so I never thought to speak of them, just as I never remarked on the air or the feel of a blanket at night. Or the bark of my father's lap that I loved so well. Every year at the summer solstice, we burned a bonfire and danced around the maypole.

And in winter, we hung mistletoe in the cottage. Pop spoke of fairies who lived beneath the may trees, of selkie seals who swam ashore and enchanted the lovelorn, and of brave clansmen who died fighting the English. A wet horse with a shining mane is a kelpie come to take you away. Pop's voice spooled like caramel as he shook a warning finger at me.

And if you swim in the river and leave your clothes out for the bean night, she'll steal your soul and that'll be the end of you. 

“Don't frighten her,” Mom scolded, and Pop put up a finger as if to warn me that this was our secret. But when we walked together looking for mushrooms in the spring, he spoke of sprites in white dresses who sat beside the river to wash the clothes of the dead, and of an unlikely lad who'd stumbled upon one and drowned the following day.

My mother grew tight lipped when Pop spoke of magical creatures and mysteries beyond God, but I knew by the gentle way my mother trimmed his beard and by the way Pop held her at the waist when they danced around the bonfire that theirs was a love bond and that it would protect me. Their stories protected me too.

I was my mother's first child. Five years later, my brother Jamie came. While she was caring for him, Mom said it was time for my first sampler. She showed me how to make my letters first on a slate with chalk, then with needle and thread. 

“One day you'll learn to read.” Mom squinted at the line of letters she'd made, and the rougher ones I'd traced out beneath them. “I didn't get far, but you, Isobel, will read books.”

I'd heard it whispered that one of Mom's aunts had been locked away in a madhouse and never seen again. She'd left behind a rainbow sampler that hung behind my mother's sewing chair. I'd studied it for hints of madness but found none. I looked at it that day and vowed I would make one even more beautiful in my own time.

I experimented with a thimble made of seal bone, then settled on a plain tin thimble that fit my small finger. Tongue between my teeth, I worked carefully. When I fumbled and pushed the needle beneath my fingernail, I never cried out. Young though I was, I was full of obedient determination. I was preparing a green thread for the letter D when mom came up behind me.

“What have you done?”

Her angry voice washed over me. 

“Is it wrong?”

I studied my work. It was neat and straight. 

“I gave you black thread to make the letters in black.”

“But A is red,” I said quietly. Like the colors in the wind and the hue of my mother's voice, this had come to me without intention or fanfare. “B is blue.

C is yellow.”

“No, they are not.” My mother slapped my knuckles with her timbre hook. The blow was hard, and tears stung my eyes. She'd never struck me before. “Never say that.” 

Her words flashed in blue black bolts, and I saw the whites of her eyes. She wasn't only angry, she was afraid. “They'll call you crazy or say you're a witch. They'll say the devil's taken hold of you, and they'll want to burn it out of you. Do you hear?”

I'd heard whispered stories of witches hanged and burned in the fields, of men and women who did not defend against the devil, and then found themselves full of evil and spite. Witches were spoken of in the past, but evil, insanity, and death were as plausible to me as my father's selkie seals and deadly kelpie seahorses.

“Isobel, do you understand?”

I nodded wordlessly, but my mother shook me by the shoulders so hard my teeth rattled. She meant for me to be afraid. 

“You must defend against it, Isobel. You must pray and be strong. Promise me.”

“Yes, Mom. I promise.”

I think I'll stop there. 

Carol M. Cram

Perfect. Perfect. That's a great introduction to the novel, and also we could see how you used colors. You know, her father's voice is caramel, not brown. 

Laurie Lico Albanese

Yeah, it was fun to do that. And sometimes when I'm writing now, I still find myself like using the same kind of thing, like her voice sounded like pearls to me or something like that.

So, it was fun and it kind of stuck with me. I don't know. I always see things very visually. You know, Carol, I've spoken to audiences and then had people come up to me afterward, you know, twice maybe and say, I realized I have synesthesia, and I never knew it before. 

Carol M. Cram

Wow. Isn't that interesting? 

Laurie Lico Albanese

Yeah. It's in my research. I found out that probably one of Emerson's daughters had synesthesia. There are tiny references to it that you can read in stuff that Thoreau wrote in letters about the children. I did a lot of research because I was going to write another book in that time period, but that didn't happen.

Carol M. Cram

Aside from the fact that this must be a very interesting thing to have, it's a wonderful literary device.

Laurie Lico Albanese

It really worked well in this novel. Remember when Anthony Doerr wrote All the Light We Cannot See, and she was blind? And I was, like, that is phenomenal. Like, how can you do that? And I thought about that a little bit when I was working, just the idea of somebody who has an extra sense or who's missing a sense, whose other senses are heightened.

You know, in that selection that I read, there's the mention of witches and we didn't talk at all about Hawthorne and the witches. 

Carol M. Cram

I was going to just talk about that, actually. Yeah, about the witches and it's basically a dual time novel. So, talk a little bit about that and some of the challenges, maybe, of writing in your time. 

Laurie Lico Albanese

 So, what I'd like to talk about actually is just to mention that Isobel Gamble has a history of her great-great-great-great-grandmother was accused of witchcraft. That's Isobel Gowdy.

And that was a real person. You can find the transcripts to that trial, and of course, a lot has been written about it apocryphally or creatively, but she really was a real person. We don't entirely know what happened to her after she was accused, which I used in the book.

Carol M. Cram

That was in Scotland, right? 

Laurie Lico Albanese

Yes, exactly, that was in Scotland. So, but even more factually, and known to history and to our history, is that Nathaniel Hawthorne's great-great-grandfather was a magistrate in the Salem witch trials, and he was the only person among the girls who did the accusing and the magistrates who sat on the trials, he was the only person who never recanted. And when one of the women was being hanged as a witch, wrongfully, of course, she screamed from the gallows, I'm no more a witch than you are a wizard. And if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink. Which, two things about that. One, I use it in the book, and I give it to Isobel Gowdy who screams, Yea, I am what you say I am. I've lain with the devil's forked prick inside me. And if you kill me, hell will rain on earth.

So that was fun, and then one of Hawthorne's relatives after the witch trials actually died choking on his own blood, and so Hawthorne being the sensitive creature that he was, you know, he was a writer after all, and I gave him all the flaws of personal flaws that a writer can have, which is, like, the story is everything, you know, I'm superstitious, la la la la, so he was haunted by the history of the magistrate and the curse. And his second novel, which is The House of Seven Gables, is actually about someone who's descended from the accused, someone who is accused of being a witch, courting and falling in love with someone who's descended from the accusers.

So, I hid a lot of things about Hawthorne's literature and life in the book that if you know about him, you might realize, but otherwise you may not.

Carol M. Cram

So, what would you say is the theme of Hester?

Laurie Lico Albanese

For me, the theme is a woman finding her own way, right? As I said before, I was really invested, in this idea that your curse is your gift, and your gift is your curse. But, other than that, also that women's work, that embroidery and women's work, can take you very far. Oh, and that what we think of as our powers, men sometimes want to call witchcraft. So those were my favorite themes in the book. 

And in the end, you know, women band together in the story. And I think, what women can do together, you know.

Carol M. Cram

Exactly, the power of community. Yeah. There's a lot of timely, as we said earlier, a lot of timely themes in this novel. 

So, one of my goals with The Art In Fiction Podcast is to inspire other authors. So, what's one thing you've learned from writing your historical novels that you didn't know before? 

Laurie Lico Albanese

Oh, my God, every time I do some research, I learn something new.

So let me think with this novel. Oh, the entire subplot about the people of color, about the formerly enslaved people. What I learned that I only vaguely knew that I learned very clearly working on this book is that the North had slaves too, right? The first slave ship built in America was built right outside of Salem and set sail from Salem.

So, the whole idea that slavery was the Southern problem, it only happened because the North abolished slavery first. And then they also decided Daniel Webster was actually the lawyer who decided to make that a thing, that it was the South's problem and not the North's problem. So, I was really interested in that.

And also, I learned a lot about that whole idea about that whole segment of society. And, you know, one of the things I try to do in the book is take someone who's otherwise marginalized, a woman in this case, and put her in the center of the story. But I also decided if I'm going to put a woman who's marginalized, what about these other marginalized people?

You know, I realized, I learned that when you read books written in this time period, unless you're reading Harriet Beecher Stowe, you would think there wasn't a Black person. I mean, you read Louisa May Alcott, there are no people of color. So, I learned a lot about that. And, you know, Henry James really admired Hawthorne. He wrote a little monograph about him. That was really interesting. Today, I'm researching something in biblical times, and I found out that Flaubert wrote a novella about Herodias, Salome of the Seven Veils’s mother. 

Carol M. Cram

I did not know that. Yeah, it's amazing the rabbit holes that you go down when you're an author.

Thank you so much, Laurie, for chatting with me. I've just so enjoyed this conversation. 

Laurie Lico Albanese

Thank you, Carol. So did I. It was a lot of fun. 

Carol M. Cram

I've been speaking with Laurie Lico Albanese, author of three novels listed on Art In Fiction including Hester listed in the Textile Arts category, and Stolen Beauty and The Miracles of Prato, both listed in the Visual Arts category on Art In Fiction at www.Art In Fiction.com. Be sure to check the show notes for a link to Laurie’s website at www.laurielicoalbanese.com. You'll also find a link to a 20% discount on a subscription to Pro Writing Aid, a fantastic editing tool for writers. 

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