Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [188]
I would like to thank Michael Pietsch for his continuing encouragement and brilliant editing; Stephen Lamont for his elegant copyediting; Ginger Barber for her wisdom in literary and financial matters; and John Osborn for his guidance and assistance, as well as for his confident eye and ear.
Fortune’s Rocks
by Anita Shreve
A READING GROUP GUIDE
In a summer community on the coast of New Hampshire at the turn of the last century, a girl is drawn into a passionate affair with a man nearly three times her age. . . .
Fortune’s Rocks is the story of Olympia Biddeford — privileged, well educated, and mature beyond her years — and her affair with John Haskell, a married doctor with four children. Drawn together on the night of the summer solstice, the pair set in motion a series of events with surprising and far-reaching consequences.
If Walls Could Talk . . .
Anita Shreve describes how she came to write Fortune’s Rocks
I live in an old house, built more than two centuries ago. Sometimes I walk around the house and think about the people who have gone before me: The baby who was born in the room just off the kitchen; the woman who cried from the inattention of her husband in the upstairs bedroom; the families who huddled around the massive kitchen hearth; the child who perished from diphtheria croup in the room that is now my son’s bedroom. It is a house riddled with history, a house full of stories.
So it was not surprising that when I saw a house I thought was exceptionally beautiful, I would begin to think about its history and would develop this history in the novel The Pilot’s Wife. The house I describe in that novel is one I have actually seen — on the coast of southern Maine, near the New Hampshire border. It is a graceful and beautiful “cottage,” with lovely floor-to-ceiling windows and a mansard roof. I took the house and its location and created a story within it — that of a woman who loses her husband in a horrific accident and then discovers that he may not have been who she thought he was. In many ways, the house is both shelter to Kathryn Lyons and testing ground for her strength and stamina.
But then, as The Pilot’s Wife was nearing the end, I began to think about the history of the house, about the other women who would have lived within its walls, about the people, young and old, who would have known love and passion and fear and great joy. And so I began to think about a fifteen-year-old young woman who has come to the fictional summer resort of Fortune’s Rocks with her family in the summer of 1899. In my imagination, she is a girl just on the cusp of her womanhood, a girl who is educated beyond her years and privileged beyond the dreams of most. That she was not immune to disaster, despite these advantages, seemed appropriate and intriguing. Thus, Fortune’s Rocks was born.
That book is now finished, but I find that I am still reluctant to abandon that lovely house. Occasionally, I think about going still further back in time to when the house was a convent. What marvelous stories must be lurking there!
A brief interview with Anita Shreve
Q: What was your inspiration in writing Fortune’s Rocks?
My inspiration was the house that also appears in The Pilot’s Wife. A house that age has any number of stories to tell. Olympia’s and Kathryn’s are but two of many. I was also still deeply intrigued by nineteenth-century language. I’d experimented with it a bit in The Weight of Water, and was loath to let it go.
Q: Do you become attached to the characters you write about? Can you imagine revisiting any of them in future books — Kathryn, Olympia, Jean?
I am still deeply attached to Olympia and was