The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [260]
The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton
JANE SMILEY
A Reader’s Guide
A Conversation with Jane Smiley
Q: Explain the genesis of The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton.
A: I was in Washington D.C. during a book tour when I heard that the federal building in Oklahoma had been bombed. I then called a friend of mine and told him that I wanted to write about the intersection of ideology and violence in American life. Without hesitation he said, "Kansas, 1850." So the idea came from outside of me, but the material was so interesting that it quickly drew me in.
Q: How did you select a genre for the novel?
A: Well, when I started writing The Greenlanders in the early eighties, I knew I wanted to write an epic, a tragedy, a comedy, and a romance. Someone I read defined all American novels of the nineteenth century as romances. So it was clear to me that if I was going to write a romance, it was going to be set in the nineteenth century.
I was trained in medieval literature, which has a stock of romances, and the one that I really loved was the thirteenth century Middle English romance The Lay of Havelok the Dane. I would define romance simply as a story in which a character goes on a journey and sees amazing things. Nonetheless, I wanted to play with some of the genre’s conventions. Havelok’s adventure ends in triumph. At the close of her travels Lidie is not saved; she doesn’t find the holy grail. That’s the sign that it’s a modern romance.
Q: Talk a bit about the research that preceded the writing of this novel.
A: The primary source material for this novel was extensive and wonderful. Many women in late-nineteenth century Kansas kept journals; some were quite sad; all of them were politically conscious. One of the most famous belongs to Sarah Robinson, the wife of Governor Robinson. She was smart; she knew what was going on; and she had lyrical moments, too.
She was not only a source of information, but a model of what was possible for a woman in those days.
Q: What’s the story behind your decision to introduce each chapter with an excerpt from Catherine E. Beecher’s A Treatise on Domestic Economy, for the Use of Young Ladies at Home?
A: discovered Beecher when reading a book about the history of housework titled Never Done. As a research tool Beecher’s book offered a great deal of substance to me: it was a guide to what Lidie would know and do. Yet I also loved Beecher’s tone of voice and writing style as well as her opinions about what it meant to be a good woman and a good wife. I thought I could piggyback a bit on Catherine Beecher, that she could help me help the reader understand Lidie’s story in the context of nineteenth century domestic life.
First, I thought it was going to take me forever to weave the Beecher text into my novel, that I was going to have to know all the chapters forwards and backwards before using them. Then I decided to use the book like a fundamentalist reads the bible: opened it up, ran my finger down the page, and if it stopped on something remotely appropriate I put it in.
Q: Your 1996 Harper’s essay, "Say It Ain’t So, Huck," for many a dander-raising dismantling of Twain’s famous work, has led a number of critics to regard this novel as polemical corrective rather than dispassionate literature.
A: I prefer to look at it this way: Twain is the dad, Harriet Beecher Stowe is the mom, and Catherine Beecher is the maiden aunt, and I’m not going to throw any of them out of the house. And I don’t think that I have to say that one influenced me more than the other. I love Uncle Tom’s Cabin; I think it’s a much underestimated piece of work, and I learned a lot from reading it—not only about slavery, but about writing as well as the different concerns about men and women. There are scenes of nineteenth century domestic life in Stowe’s work that are as important as any