Imprinted Life discussion

Introduction material http://www.marynovik.com/pages/book/c... for pre-reading for "Conceit". Comments starting August 13.

Now open for PRE-READING comments!

I read a tiny part of Mary Novik's website, reinforcing what I already knew and discovering new facts about Conceit and about writing it.

Narrative voices shift among Pegge Donne, John Donne, and Ann More. The setting opens and closes with The Great London Fire of 1666. Between those points are flashbacks.

The details of history add plausibility and realism, but the historically unknown is imagined. The historical times give an idea of women and men's lives and of life in the seventeenth-century London. Liked Mary Novik's quote in the interview with Erik Forbes,

"If you put my novel beside an authoritative life of Donne, they won't contradict one another, but Conceit ventures into bedrooms, embraces intimacies forbidden to biographers."

A review by Dana Huff, linked from her and Mary's interview, interestingly points out the story's moving ahead in time to Peggy's adulthood when she is a mother and grandmother.

The energetic main character Pegge is the focus. About her other characters might meditate, but London is seen through her. Relationships of love, jealousy, and emotions among characters and realistic details embody this novel.

Publisher: Doubleday Canada.

Further explored Mary's author website, specifically "The Book Club Guide" and "Questions and Answers".

The readers' Guide introduced the main characters--Pegge Donne, John Donne, Ann More Donne, the famous angler Izaak Walton, the diarist Samuel Pepys, Pegge's husband William Bowles--and the familial and spousal relationships. Pegge is portrayed as unconventional, having more learning than her female siblings and females of seventeenth century London, having more freedom of movement for seeing London, and having a penchant to marry from love and romance rather than from a one prearranged by Donne, Dean of St Paul's Cathedral. She has a driving curiosity about her parents' extraordinary courtship, elopement, and love. The novel depicts the Donnes' seventeenth-century London, the Great Fire of 1666, and the coming-of-age of Pegge from nine-year-old child to married woman. Those events are brought together through Pegge's thinking about and acting through them.

The "Q and A" is an interview. The author talks about Pegge the little-known historical, youngest daughter of John Donne, whom this biographical fiction imagined from the primary sources about John Donne and his time period. What effect did Pegge have in preserving the memory of her father and his poetry? How was life like in the large Donne household? Mary also describes how--from her extensive literary knowledge about that love poet who became a priest and from her further research--she decided to

"...liberate the people from the historical record."

She let the characters "interact", and she "had to follow it."

We all know that Conceit's seventeenth-century setting rubs shoulders with literary giants, such as William Shakespeare, Izaak Walton, Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, and John Donne himself. They figure into the story or research and in the author webpages, such as the following.

This morning I looked at a part of the author webpages called "Backgrounds", wherein are memorabilia related to this novel. An interesting passage is about the Linnaeus Flower Clock and the "aequinoctales" flowers precisely announcing the daily time by their opening and closing. That reference particularly pertains to Chapter 8 of Conceit in the year 1599 when fifteen-year-old Ann More and twenty-seven-year-old John Donne are subsequently to elope. In the novel's writing, primary sources of the period were sought for authentic descriptions and names of flora. That said, nature in the novel might be something to which to be sensitive.

Within that section is also "Sources for the Novel"--eyewitness accounts of London's Great Fire of 1666, Walton's finishing Donne's biography, Donne's sermons and meditations, especially #17 noting "No man is an island" and "the Bell tolls" and contemporary practices [Donne's English differs from todays'], and Donne's love poetry. I like Mary's description about her novel and her writing it,

"...piecing Donne's love poems together into a chronological story, as Pegge does--becoming more obsessed and jealous in the process--gave me insight into John and Ann's extraordinary love--the fictional narrative that is at the heart of Conceit."

That is some of what's in there and some of what I perused.

There is more to "Backgrounds" (above). The book's cover art of the enticing girl is of a Pierre-Narcisse Guérin painting (1794).

And, many people recognize a reference to the seventeenth-century diarist Samuel Pepys but another diarist John Evelyn possibly less so though at least as deserving for his accomplishments.

Outside of the "Backgrounds", another source during pre-reading the novel is the group discussion at Book Haven. There is background, too, at the author's "News and Events".

Yikes, browsing the Book Haven group's comments taught me a lot.

Which chapters of Conceit particularly excite readers.
Who wrote biographies of John Donne.
What age(s) is Pegge (pronounced Peg).
Which themes add to the sensuality and intimacy of story and characters.
Which primary materials survive.
Which websites and books have Donne's poetry.
What is the history of St. Paul's Cathedral.

In the last messages, I like Mary's definition of a "thoughtful" reader and conversationalist, as one "engaged" in the subject and "intuitive", bringing her/his insights to the subject.