Jacqueline Winspear came to Santa Rosa on Tuesday, 23 April 2019. Thank you to Copperfield‘s Books that sponsors such great visits from amazing and talented writers. Moving to the North Bay Area from the interior of the United States wasn’t only because I was given the opportunity for a dream job. It was also because moving here would mean nights like tonight. An otherwise boring Tuesday has been transformed into an evening for fandom (in the best ways) and even a dose of inspiration.
Jacqueline Winspear is just as nice as you could hope. She’s very sweet. And even after years of living in California, she is still quite British (read: Charming).
For fans of Maisie Dobbs and her series of books, Jacqueline was able to share quite a bit about her latest, The American Agent, and also about her other new book, What Would Masie Do?, which I found fascinating.
The American Agent is book 15 of Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series. This latest book is set at the beginning of World War II during The Blitz, and Winspear, though born far too late to have experienced The Blitz first-hand, did have a personal connection to the historic events that unfold in her pages. When the 1969 film The Battle of Britain debuted with its blockbuster cast, the author asked her mother to take her to see it. Her mother replied, “No, I saw it the first time.” At first, she thought her mother was mistaken that the movie had come out earlier, but she later realized, no, she meant The Blitz itself. Her mother had been in a building that had bombed and collapsed and had spent “a significant amount of time” trapped. Her mother, understandably, remained claustrophobic the rest of her life.
Winspear shared stories of pioneering women war correspondents and members of the Women’s Voluntary Service. The women who served in this way worked to serve tea, give aid for shelter, and to identify the dead. They also had to write a daily report. Winspear spent lots of time in the archives of that organization reading these “searing reports” from the women who shouldered much of the recovery during The Blitz.
And, in the tune of helping people and making things, she’s created the book What Would Maisie Do? It’s a collection of favorite scenes and quotes from the Maisie Dobbs series, and the stories-behind-the-stories of those scenes. They are also reflections for the reader. This project was one that Winspear admitted had been in the making since the introduction of Maisie Dobbs. But when fellow writer, Amy Krouse Rosenthal passed away in 2017 she felt compelled to “make something” as Rosenthal encouraged all the time (the two writers shared an agent, and the three women have birthdays all in a row). “It’s really important to make things,” Winspear said.
In my next post, I’ll have a few more photos, but even better — answers from Winspear to a few burning questions. Click here for PART 2.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
Historical Fiction for the Historian
Most of my research is done through primary sources: newspapers, career guides, self-help books, medical books, etiquette guides, advertisements and so on… I also look at secondary sources, but then always pivot back to read the sources from the period that are referenced. In terms of writing historical fiction, one of the most interesting things for me is not presenting events as we might understand them today, but trying to understand how the same events were perceived during their time. So, in the case of the sleepwalker found frozen to death, in the 2010s, we would immediately question “too much schoolwork” as a cause, but in the 1910s, that opinion was backed up by doctors and medical books. And in fact, in the course of Kitty’s investigations, she speaks to a “nerve specialist” who tells her that girls who study too hard or work too much (like herself) are prone to all sorts of diseases. She has to get past that in order to solve the mystery.
