Connecting with Christina Rossetti in post-war Italy in The Lost Dresses of Italy by M. A. McLaughlin

I'm speaking today with M. A. McLaughlin, author of The Lost Dresses of Italy listed in the Textile Arts category on Art In Fiction.

View the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/rDe_rXrLC2k

• Overview of the story of The Lost Dresses of Italy as a dual time novel taking place in 1947 and 1864 and inspired by a three-week trip to Italy taken by Victorian poet Christina Rossetti
• Poetry of Christina Rossetti and why it has endured
• Christina's sonnet sequence Monna Innominata as inspiration for the plot
• Combining a costume history and design with the story of Christina's time in Italy
• Reasons for setting the modern story in post-war Verona
• Researching costume design and preservation
• The role of pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the novel
• Some of the challenges of fictionalizing real people
• What is it about the Romantics and Victorians that Marty is attracted to?
• Reading from The Lost Dresses of Italy
• Things that Marty learned from writing her novel - the complicated nature of Italy's participation in World War II and its aftermath.

Read more about M. A. McLaughlin on her website: https://martyambrose.com/

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Transcript

Carol Cram

Hello and welcome. I'm Carol Cram, host of The Art In Fiction podcast. This episode features M. A. McLaughlin, author of The Lost Dresses of Italy, listed in the Textile Arts category on Art In Fiction.

The Lost Dresses of Italy earned the Florida Writers Association Gold Medal in historical fiction and was runner up for the FSW published book of the year for 2024.

M. A. McLaughlin, also known as Marty Ambrose McLaughlin, has also published a trilogy set around the Byron/Shelley Circle in 19th-century Italy, earning a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Marty's work has been featured internationally in blogs, journals, and websites.

Welcome to The Art In Fiction Podcast, Marty. 

M. A. McLaughlin

Thank you so much, Carol, for inviting me to be on the podcast. I'm really excited.

Carol Cram

Well, I'm excited to have you. I just finished The Lost Dresses of Italy and really enjoyed it because I love Italy, I love the textile arts, and I really love poetry such as that by Christina Rosetti. So, the novel is a dual timeline mystery set in 1947 and 1864 told from the point of view of a textile historian in 1947, and then the poet Christina Rosetti in 1864, and inspired by the real-life mysteries surrounding Christina Rosetti.

So, could you tell us a little bit about your inspiration for the novel? Why Christina Rosetti and what was the mystery? 

M. A. McLaughlin

Well, I have to say, I have loved Christina Rossetti's poetry my whole life, and I teach at a small state college, and I have taught her poetry for a long time. And she was actually quite famous during her lifetime.

She was a member of the famous Rossetti family, and her brother was Dante Gabriel, the famous artist. Her other brother, William, was an art critic and an author. And her sister Maria was a scholar. Her father, a famous Italian revolutionary, was Gabriel Rossetti. So, she came from this hugely famous celebrity family, but she herself was a rather private, kind of elusive figure.

And her poetry is just lyrical. It's beautiful. And at one point she was actually going to become poet laureate, but by that time she was in her sixties, and she was somewhat ill. And so, she really had a lot of fame herself, but like a lot of female poets, I think, in the 19th century, she sort of fell out of the canon and she hasn't been read as much. 

And yet, when I teach her, the students just love her work, especially her sonnets. It's the one thing I've heard over and over about this book. I've never read Christina Rossetti's poetry, and I love her. I'd always wanted to write a book about her, and she was in fact single her whole life.

She never married. She was engaged twice, and she only made one trip to Northern Italy, and it was a three-week trip, which we don't know a whole lot about, except that she did connect with one of her father's old revolutionary friends. She went to Milan, Verona, and Lake Como, she wrote one letter about it, and she wrote a poem.

But when she came back to London, she broke off with her suitor and about a year later she wrote this sonnet sequence called the Monna Innominata, which means, as you know, The Hidden Woman. I'd always thought something happened during those three weeks. And so, I thought, okay, I wanted to give her a story for those three weeks.

And so, I created a story about what happened during those three weeks, and that was my whole impetus behind how I included her in the book. 

Carol Cram:

That is so fascinating because as a novelist myself, I'm thinking, wow, that that is a great way to go about it. You find this period in a favorite person's life that you want to write about and go, okay, what's the story around it?

And so, you decided to meld it with costume design, her dresses, the lost dresses. Tell us about that. 

M. A. McLaughlin

Well, I've written three other historical mysteries around the Byron/Shelley Circle. But I wanted to take on something bigger and I thought, how am I going to tell this story?

Because I want to tell it through a more contemporary narrator as well. And I thought, hmm. We've seen writers find old diaries. We've seen writers find old journals. And I thought, well, let me do this in a slightly different way. We tell her story of the secret three weeks through dresses that are found, and the dresses have the secret.

I made the more modern, the 1947 narrator, a costume curator, and which I have to say melds two of my loves, fashion and poetry. And I actually had thought of going into textiles at one point. I mean, I still wanted to be a writer, but I love the whole field. I love textile exhibitions. So, I thought this would be a really different way of telling the story through having the costume curator find secrets and clues within the dresses. And I will say it's not an unknown thing that, in fact, seamstresses, especially in couture, would often, as you know, put little things in the hems. They would put things in the pockets, especially seamstresses who made wedding dresses. It was considered unlucky, so they would put little charms in the wedding dresses.

And I will also say briefly that one of the things that this connected with was something in my own life where I had a great aunt who passed away, and when my mother and I went through her things in one of those old cedar chests that women used to have, my great aunt passed away in her late seventies, and when we opened up the cedar chest, there was a marriage certificate and she had had a secret marriage and there was her wedding clothing dresses, and all of these were things we had no idea about.

We never knew why she hid the marriage, but within that trunk were all of her secrets that she kept and passed on to us. So somehow that got filed away and it came out in the book. So, it does happen. 

Carol Cram

You just never know, do you, in your own life what might come back. That's a wonderful sort of springboard for the imagination, as I like to say.

So why did you decide to set the modern story in post-war Verona rather than a little later? 

M. A. McLaughlin

That was an interesting choice. I knew I wanted to make it in Verona because that's where Christina Rosetti had been. One thing I really wanted to do was to create a more global theme. So, the theme in the book is love and loss and redemption. And when I was conceptualizing the book, and that takes me a long time, I originally started the book where it was about Christina and her father. And I thought, well, I don't think that's going to connect with a modern audience.

And so, I was writing the book, conceptualizing it, when we were in the middle of COVID. And I thought that a big part of that was at the time, how do we ever emerge from something like COVID? It was global, it was traumatic. It caused so much heartache and suffering and death. How do you ever start over again?

And so that was kind of on my mind when I started it. And I thought that we experienced, in a small way or smaller way, what happened in World War II. And how do you emerge from something as traumatic as what happened then? And a lot of books are written about World War II, but the aftermath is, what I find most interesting, is how do we deal with it and cope with it and move on?

And so that was kind of my impetus. And then at the same time as that happened, I live in southwest Florida and when I was writing it, we were hit by Hurricane Ian, and it was hugely traumatic. It was a lot more destructive than it looked on TV. And we lost our home and everything we owned on an island.

And so, I was in the middle of writing the book. We were homeless and oh my goodness, scrambling to find a place to live. And again, it was one of those hugely difficult times where people have to somehow rise to the occasion, find grace, and moments where they can find a way to survive and move on. So that was really on my mind the whole time I was writing this book.

And that's why I decided I wanted to set it then. And it was also the time when the fashion industry started up again in Italy after the war. So, it all kind of coalesced in my brain with 1947. 

Carol Cram

Well, you know, the whole post-war period is fascinating because it's almost within living memory. You're giving me ideas about, hmm. That's an interesting period. Because how do you come back from what happened in the Second World War? It was so devastating for so many people. So, Marianne’s story, because she had her own back story, the fact that she was a widow, a war widow basically. So, I'm really interested in all the stuff about the textile history and how she worked with those dresses. Tell us a little bit about your research on that, because it was absolutely fascinating. I love costumes as well. I always go to the V&A every time I'm in London. 

M. A. McLaughlin

Well, it's a total obsession of mine. I love old clothing. And when I researched it, it took about a year to research it because I really didn't know at first what a costume curator does. And as I researched it, they essentially, as you know, set up museum exhibits, but they have to work with old fabrics. They have to learn how to repair them and preserve them. Then they have to come up with concepts of how they exhibit them. And I learned about the flat exhibit, which is done on hangers, and then the exhibits with the mannequin. 

And then one of the difficulties in the book is that Marianne had a lack of access to sophisticated kinds of mannequins and tools because it's after the war. So, the mannequins are found in an old barn. 

And I corresponded with different costume curators. They were very forthcoming about the difficulties involved in this and how you have to work with these old fabrics.

You'll notice she always has gloves. You have to be part seamstress, part historian, part curator as these exhibitions are set thematically, and yet at the same time, it's very personal because you're touching things that people actually have worn. So that part was interesting. And one thing I found out was from the woman who set up Princess Margaret's dress exhibit—Queen Elizabeth's sister—once they're on the mannequin, they're not removed. So, if these exhibits travel, they travel in giant crates because every time you move the fabric off of the mannequin, it damages the fabric. So that part was interesting to me, how painstakingly they set these up. And again, like every museum exhibit, they approach it thematically. They try to show something about society, the person, and I always say, if you want to know your way into a Victorian woman's heart, just look at the dress.

The way it sort of confined women, the weight of it, the fabrics they use, and to find three dresses, such as in the book, that are pristine would be very unusual because people passed on fabrics because the fabrics were what was so expensive, unlike today.

Carol Cram

Also, I think we're all, as women anyway, I’m speaking of myself, fascinated by all the clothes they wore, especially in the Victorian era with the hoop skirts. So, it was really fascinating to learn more and more about the clothes and also that role of the fashion historian that, as you said, they have to be an historian, they have to be a seamstress, and they have to understand fabric.

I didn't know there was that much to it. Isn't it wonderful to talk to experts in the field? They are such a wonderful resource, I find. 

M. A. McLaughlin

Oh, they're incredible. And there really aren't that many places to study this. You can't get a degree in fashion curating, but you can in textile arts.

So, it's kind of like a degree in museum studies where you learn how to set up exhibits and how to work with artifacts, but then again, you apprentice. And in England, it's really a huge thing. 

Carol Cram

Let's talk a little bit about Dante Gabriel—Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I loved the scenes with him. It made me want to look at his work again. I went to university in Reading in England back in the '70s, and everybody was a fan of the pre-Raphaelites. They were very, very popular. We used to go up to the Tate and look at the pre-Raphaelites. So, tell us a little bit about the challenges related to fictionalizing real people, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, and Christina.

M. A. McLaughlin

Well, it's funny. I just put in for a conference proposal on this, about popularizing literary figures, and it's very tricky. And I went to the University of York, so I wasn't far behind you there. I personally always loved the pre-Raphaelites. And then as you know, the Tate Gallery just had an exhibit of the Rossetti last year. 

Carol Cram

Oh, I missed that.

M. A. McLaughlin 

Oh, it was extraordinary. And then it moved part of it to the Delaware Museum of Art, where they have a huge pre-Raphaelite collection, but he was in particular, it was kind of like writing about Lord Byron, they're such huge figures and everybody knows so much about them that it becomes, in some ways, a little bit difficult to write about them.

And I always say what you have to do is find, dig for the person that's inside the persona. And Dante Gabriel was one of those people who I think, as an artist as well, knew how to curate his image in a very modern way. And yet I think when you look at the journals, when you look at the letters, those are the things that give you those little clues as to who that person really is.

It's harder with Christina Rosetti because she was much more private and her letters tended to be kind of mundane about details. His were much more revealing and personal. But he still has this big, larger-than-life personality. And yet he was such a part of her story because they were so close, and he illustrated her poetry books.

But I will say the next book that I just turned in, it does have Dante Gabriel in it. And Elizabeth Siddal, his model and his wife, because my mother, after she read the book, said, are we doing to see more of Dante Gabriel? And I said, yes, Mom, we are. And it got me into working on the new book because underneath that was a man who was really haunted by a lot of these myths.

The Dante myths, the Arthurian myths. And yet he was a person who was such a groundbreaker in terms of art, how to design book covers and textiles. So, the whole Rossetti family was kind of overwhelming to portray. I had to really be careful not to get too caught up in my adoration of them and make them into characters who were relatable.

Carol Cram

Yes. Which you did. And because one of the things I enjoyed the most in the Christina sections was her interaction with her mother, and especially with William. Because William was the other brother, because he was not as flamboyant and as exciting as Dante Gabriel. But what you did is you rooted it in a real family. They felt like a real family. They felt like real brothers and sisters. So maybe that's a way in. 

M. A. McLaughlin

And I think the interaction just about the Rossettis, I did a lot of research on them. They were very close, and in many ways stimulated each other's creativity. But I think with William, there's always this sense of sort of nostalgia that he isn't an artist.

Carol Cram

Yes. 

M. A. McLaughlin

And Christina and Dante Gabriel were artists, and he was the one who had the more mundane job who sort of supports the family. He then becomes the family biographer because he was the one that lived a very long life. And so, there's this kind of interesting interaction between all of them and I found that just fascinating. And again, their love of their older sister, whom they all thought was really the most brilliant Rossetti, who in fact did not write poetry or art, but was a scholar. 

Carol Cram

Yes. And she became a nun, didn't she? 

M. A. McLaughlin

Yes. 

Carol Cram

Your background as an academic is in the Romantic and Victorian eras. What is it that you love so much about the poetry, the art of the Romantics and the Victorians? 

M. A. McLaughlin

It's sort of hard to know where to begin. 

Carol Cram

Yeah, I know that's a big question. 

M. A. McLaughlin

Truly, I'll keep it brief, but probably the Byron/Shelley Circle was my greatest love, but the whole 19th century, and it just always seemed to me, even in the Victorian era, that it was a time of human sort of reach for individualism and independence.

You see a lot of very unusual women who did things that were out of the norm. There were certainly problems, you know, historically and socially. But it just seemed like an era of big personalities, great poets, and just absolutely beautiful literature. 

Carol Cram

Would you like to do a short reading for us from The Lost Dresses of Italy?

M. A. McLaughlin

I would, and I chose a passage from Christina's narrative since we've been talking about her.

It's a passage toward the beginning of the book where she arrives in Milan and she goes out onto the balcony, and she connects with her father's native country. And there's this moment of her moving from outsider to connection. So, I will read that.

Once I had settled into my room, I threw open the tall French doors and strolled onto the small balcony, a little space that contained a wrought iron table and two chairs surrounded by potted bamboo trees and a flowering vine covered arch, creating an almost grotto like feel in the middle of the city.

Moving forward, I inhaled the scent of jasmine flowers, letting the fragrance engulf me with its sweet aroma. It was perfect, and I was finally alone. After two long days of travel in the close quarters of our carriage with my family, I welcomed the respite of being lost in my own thoughts and solitude. A few snatches of conversations floated up from passersby on the street below during the hour of the passeggiata, the evening walk, and I paused to listen.

How the Milanese spoke my father's native language with the words lengthened and pronounced precisely. Each word seemed overly enunciated, more musical than papa's loose, easy way speaking Italian after decades of living in England, and it was much easier for me to translate as I eavesdropped.

I closed my eyes and absorbed the sounds as if they were melodies. Once lost and now found sweeping me along with their familiar call. I could not move or think or speak, remaining motionless on the balcony. I felt something stir inside an ancestral connection to this unfamiliar land. For so long I had written poetry about what it felt like to be shut out.

The feeling that I could never take part in the vibrant voices around me. 

The door was shut
 I looked between its iron bars and saw it lie
 My garden mine beneath the sky. 

And even though I now stood apart on my balcony, I could hear the song that reached up and touched my being, claiming me as a daughter of the soil with an unstoppable power to set me free from the restraints of my life.

The door had creaked open now, and I was eager to see what lay beyond. 

Carol Cram

Thank you. That was wonderful. You can really get a sense of Christina, you can really feel her as a human being, as a woman, as a creative woman. That was so much fun to read. 

M. A. McLaughlin

It was a privilege to write about her.

Carol Cram

Oh, I would imagine, yes. So, I really wanted to talk about setting. It's such a big part of your novel you really bring to life, particularly Verona and Padua. I loved your descriptions of Padua University because I have been there, the Palazzo Bo.

I presume you've also visited, and did it help with your inspiration? How important is traveling to the places you're going to write about, do you think, for a writer? 

M. A. McLaughlin

I did actually. It was our third trip and I'm very lucky. My husband speaks Italian. And he’s fluent in Spanish. And when we went on the first trip, he taught himself Italian. And he is really good at languages. I am not, sadly, but when I wrote this book, we did go to Milan to research where she went. And the one thing in the book that of many that was true, the one letter she wrote about being on Lake Como, she did sail with her brother William, and she wrote, I heard the nightingale sing, and I used that line in the book because it just seemed so evocative.

And she also went to Verona. I don't think I could write about a place if I haven't seen it. And you know this, the sounds, the smells, the sense of space in Italy is so different and the positioning of the buildings.

And there's always someone, not so much in this book and the Byron/Shelley book, there were people who were sort of local scholars who I would have the privilege to talk with in smaller towns and Jim would translate. So, there were opportunities like that. And Verona I think is an unsung gem of Italy.

It's such an evocative city because the book has not just history and mystery, but it's got romance. And Verona is such a beautifully romantic city in so many ways. And I always look for in the setting, what I call the emotional center of a scene. And the Juliet Tomb, which today is not the same tomb she would've seen because they had to move it since poets were going in the 19th century and stealing parts of the stones and that sort of thing. 

They actually moved it lower, but it's very evocative being there. And I thought this is a great place for Christina and Angelo to declare their love for each other. I find too, when I'm traveling and doing research, there's something that speaks to me in the setting and I don't know it until I get there.

Carol Cram

And you can't know until you get there. Like, you wouldn't have known that you were going to put a scene there. I love to travel to the places that I'm going to write about as well, because you need to be open to what's going to happen. 

M. A. McLaughlin

And readers are very particular - you have to get the details correct, which you should.

Carol Cram

For example, your descriptions of the Palazzo Bo, which is not particularly well known at the University of Padua. Well, I was just there two years ago, not even that, and took a tour and you described places I went. Oh, I saw that. I remember that!

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

M. A. McLaughlin

You know, I thought about this and the one thing I learned that I found surprising did not have to do with Christina. It was about Italy.

And I don't think I really understood the complicated role that Italy played in World War II. And that was very illuminating to me that as you know, Italy had only been unified for about 50 or 60 years before the rise of fascism. The South never really was as much a part of it.

Italy was still the little sort of kingdoms. As you know today people will say, well, I'm a Florentine more so than I'm Italian. And so, they were almost reluctant partners in the Axis and then shifted to the allies and that the occupation of Italy by the Germans was a really dark time for them.

So there was just a sense of trying to understand this complicated relationship, how it split families apart, how impoverished the country was and how people wanted, other countries wanted, to punish Italy and yet the US was much more sympathetic in trying to help them recover after the war.

Though of course, it doesn't sort of overlook the things that occurred, but it was a lot more ambiguous than I had thought. And as you talk to people, they also were not as forthcoming about that. They're sort of like, well, we've moved on. It was a dark time, but that was a lot of research that I found surprising.

Carol Cram

Thank you so much, Marty. I've so enjoyed our conversation. 

M. A. McLaughlin

Thank you so much, Carol. And I hope you enjoy your trip to Italy. 

Carol Cram

I will.

I've been speaking with M.A. McLaughlin, author of The Lost Dresses of Italy, listed in the Textile Arts category on Art In Fiction at www.artinfiction.com. Be sure to check the show notes for a link to Marty's website at www.martyambrose.com.

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