hmhbooks:“When I began work on THE WEIGHT OF INK, there were two things bothering me. First: in A Ro
hmhbooks:“When I began work on THE WEIGHT OF INK, there were two things bothering me. First: in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf (paraphrasing Olive Schreiner) asked what would have happened to Shakespeare’s sister, if she’d been just as talented as her brother. Woolf’s answer? She died without writing a word.In 2004, I had one child and another on the way. I was realizing how complicated women’s lives can be…and how difficult it can be to balance a life of the body (motherhood) with a life of the mind. Amid all this, I found myself wondering what it would have taken for a Judith Shakespeare not to die without writing a word. In Shakespeare’s day and age, a woman who wanted to write would have had to flout conventions of womanly behavior, resign herself to being labeled unnatural, and probably lie and deceive and disguise her identity. Thinking about that made me want to explore the question of how far a woman might go for freedom of spirit and mind…and at what cost.…So that’s where the novel began. In Ester Velasquez, I found my Judith Shakespeare, my dissenting woman who refused martyrdom and silence.”- Rachel Kadish on THE WEIGHT OF INK, out June 6, 2017 -- source link