Read The Madwoman Upstairs Online
Authors: Catherine Lowell
The Madwoman Upstairs (45 page)
That said, it was much more interesting to explore the psyche of someone who resents her ancestry rather than someone who adores it. What sort of duty do we owe to the people who gave us independence? Is Samantha wasting the freedom her ancestors fought for? Like many forms of hatred, Samantha’s resentment stems from her own insecurity.
As far as my favorite woman writer goes—I would really love to grab a beer with Aphra Behn.
Do you have a favorite Brontë sibling? Do you hope that your book will bring some new attention to Anne and her work?
I love Emily. She seemed so delightfully odd. If we put her in one of those standardized test questions—“which one of these is not like the others?”—I think she’d win each time, regardless of the topic. What I admire most about her is that despite having very limited worldly experience, her one novel showed the depth and breadth of someone who has seen everything. It’s encouraging to think that you that you don’t necessarily need wildly exciting life experiences to arrive at some universal truth—the greatest insights can often come from carefully observing mundane things.
I really do hope people start paying more attention to Anne! Her two novels are so different– in
Agnes Grey,
you get the sense that Anne is deliberately holding herself back, perhaps out of concern for her novel’s reception. But in
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,
she’s somehow developed into a fiery activist. You can really get a sense of her development between those two books. It’s easy to think of the Brontë sisters as indomitable pillars of strength, and forget that they were also human beings, fraught with the same insecurities that everyone has felt at some point. Anne is the sister who always made me remember that the Brontës were relatable people—sometimes underdogs, sometimes heroes.
Where do you stand on the argument between Samantha and Orville over how a text should be interpreted?
Regarding the debate between “literal truth” and “emotional truth,” I think the salient part of the relationship is the uncanny way in which the latter can lead to the former. The empathy we feel for make-believe characters feels real in our bodies, as if those characters were in fact long-lost friends. Fiction remains one of the only ways we can viscerally experience things that never happened to us.
If I were to weigh in on the debate over authorial intent, I’d have to give the somewhat dissatisfying “find a happy middle ground” answer. Too much concern with external information runs the risk of limiting a book’s scope, but books are so inextricably linked to history that to disregard the context in which they were written is often to waste an opportunity to better understand both the text and the era.
The Odyssey
is a great book regardless of any outside knowledge of Ancient Greece—but to understand its impact on Greece is to also understand how one story helped shape an entire civilization.
What about the Brontës do you think has helped their work to stand the test of time?
Most of the Brontë protagonists aged extremely well. They are still the kind of people we all want to be: confident, whip-smart, self-reliant, and able to be happy despite all the odds. The plots themselves have taken a page from Cinderella—almost all of them tell the story of underdogs, and everyone loves an underdog. Then, of course, there’s the picturesque drama of the Brontë’s lives and the courage with which they lived—both of which still inspire readers today.
What are you working on next? Do you think you’ll ever return to Oxford as a setting, or the Brontës as a topic?
The next book tackles one of my other favorite subjects, World War II. Stay tuned!
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2016 by Catherine R. Lowell
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First Touchstone hardcover edition March 2016
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Interior design by Maura Fadden Rosenthal
Jacket Design by TheBookDesigners
Jacket Photograph, Silhouette of Woman © Rekha Garton/Arcangel
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lowell, Catherine, 1989–
The madwoman upstairs : a novel / Catherine Lowell.
pages cm.
1. Brontë family—Fiction. 2. Family secrets—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3612.O887M34 2016
813'.6—dc23
2015026688
ISBN 978-1-5011-2421-1
ISBN 978-1-5011-2422-8 (ebook)
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