FM: You two decided to write the novel as a birthday present for a friend?

JL: He was actually our graduate student mentor at Yale, John Demos. When an academic retires, his graduate students usually hold a conference to celebrate his work. Jane and I decided that for our piece of the conference we were going to write character sketches that were a send-up of 18th-century genre fiction. It took us a week to write these character sketches, and it was fun. So we kept going, and before we knew it we’d batted back and forth 100 pages….

Part of the conceit of the novel is that it was supposed to be written as if it were written in 1764, and so there’s a lens through which the characters see the world that’s not entirely bearable for a contemporary reader. Most modern readers aren’t out there reading “Clarissa.”

I love the idea of two historians getting carried away with writing a novel, as if such things had a life of their own. And as a side note to Lepore: I’m a huge fan of Samuel Richardson and epistolary novels, so I suppose I’m a rarity among contemporary readers. Go figure.
(H/T Cliopatria for the interview link)

“Taking Liberties: Histories, Fictions, and Blind Spots”
A conversation with historians
Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore
Wednesday 21 January, 3 p.m.
Yale University
HGS 211, 320 York Street
All are welcome

Profs. Kamensky and Lepore will present their new book, Blindspot: A Novel (Spiegel and Grau, 2008), a collaboratively written work of historical fiction set in Boston on the eve of the American Revolution. Reviewers have called it a novel “as sexy as it is political, as accurate as it is outrageous,” combining “a tender love story, a murder mystery, and a brilliant sociological and political portrait of a turbulent time.”

The Promise and Pitfalls of Writing for Readers beyond the Academy
Friday, January 2, 2009: 3:30 PM-5:30 PM
Nassau Suite B (Hilton New York)

Chair:
Martha Hodes, New York University
Commentators:
Lewis H. Lapham, Lapham’s Quarterly and Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times
Deborah E. Harkness (The Jewel House), University of Southern California
Saidiya Hartman (Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route), Columbia University
Stephen A. Mihm (A Nation of Counterfeiters), University of Georgia

The Pleasures of the Imagination
Friday, January 2, 2009: 8:30 PM-10:30 PM
Trianon Ballroom (Hilton New York)

Chair:
Gabrielle Spiegel, Johns Hopkins University
Panelists:
Linda Colley, Princeton University
Natalie Zemon Davis, University of Toronto
John Demos, Yale University
Jane Kamensky, Brandeis University
Jill Lepore, Harvard University
Robert A. Rosenstone, California Institute of Technology
Jonathan D. Spence, Yale University

Oh….and grad students might want to check out the panel session where I’m speaking, too.