Article: I live in an old...

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 inattentions 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 Katherine Lyons as well as 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 it 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 and out in bookstores, but I find that I am still loathe 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!

Copyright © Anita Shreve