At dawn on a surprisingly snowy day in May, I sat at my family’s breakfast table and tried to fill an empty page in my journal with what I felt and knew. This was no small task as the wind outside shook the grey branches with their tender new leaves and tightly closed buds. Snowfall in springtime New England happened from time to time, but never so late. May 12? May 15? It was getting close to the end of the school year and yet here it was a snow day. I had woken early and come downstairs quietly to sit in the dark to watch the shadows form and then disappear on the white platen of our lawn. There wasn’t much out there to see besides wind and gentle snow. The footprints of pheasants that had passed by in the night filled with the dusting. But my heart brimmed over as I longed to describe the surprising and beautiful sight with all the passion and sorrow that it evoked in me. I was a teenager with powerful feelings, and I wanted to write about them powerfully. To write in a way where there’d be no mistaking my voice. I wanted to reveal myself on the page.

But what could I make of a wet, white day like that one? Despite my determination to see the morning as significant and my desire for the day to unfold like a book, with love appearing by the end of chapter one, the truth was nothing special would happen that day. Nothing could meet the literary high hopes that a May snowfall promised. I didn’t yet understand that a story is a construction, and life isn’t a story. It has no author, even when the life belongs to a writer.

Now, on a snowy day some fifty years and four published books later, I’m still trying to capture that same feeling in words. An urgency about life. A desire to share what it means to be human. A longing to convey something real on the page.

The closest I’ve come thus far, as far as I can tell, is my most recent novel, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann. It’s about a writer who struggles in her own unselfconscious way with inventing a life both on the page and off. Victoria is a dime novelist, a hack writer of romance and adventure tales in Gilded Age Boston. But from the very first scene, we learn that she wants more as a writer. She wants to write novels that convey what it’s like to be a real woman, not one of the heroines of the moralistic, frivolous tales that her publisher demands she pen.

Victoria is not a young woman when we meet her, and she looks back on her childhood and twenties as times of great loss. Her marriage hasn’t panned out well. Her dreams of being an author have turned into drudgery as she churns out predictable stories, much like, as she says, “a sausage factory or a brick works.” Instead, she wants to write novels about young women who, like her, have faced actual challenges, whether from poverty, lack of opportunities, or the sexism of an earlier time. She wants to explore the true story of women of her day.

Thanks to industrialization, the young women of the mid- to late 1800s were the first American women to leave their family farms. They moved to the city and lived independently. Cared for by neither parents nor husbands, they came together in boarding houses and worked in shops, factories, offices, and as domestics. The public school system had democratized reading. The cost of books came down as the price of paper and production decreased. The delivery of books via the railroads allowed for easier distribution. All these factors fed the voracious reading appetites of young women. Starting in the mid-1860s, the dime novels and longer novels for women began to sell in the hundreds of thousands. Women readers and women writers quickly transformed publishing from small family-run businesses into the companies that were precursors of the industry we know today.

Women read during their lunch hours, on the trolley to and from work, and in the evenings in the sitting rooms of their shared homes. I can picture them doing up their hair like Gibson Girls and emulating the latest fashion on meager budgets. But I especially love to imagine them poring over printed stories of girls like themselves who faced near catastrophe but were saved time and time again by men who arrived, sometimes quite literally, on a white horse. Familiar tropes of romance novels have come to us from these earlier books and my character Victoria Swann is an expert at using them.

And yet, like me on that snowy morning, she aches to say more. She’s not well educated. She has a distrust of respected literary authors, such as Henry James and Gustav Flaubert, whose novels delve into the minds and hearts of their female characters. Irritated that those gentlemen of letters had garnered such praise, Victoria says, “…women are crushed under the weight of the world’s disregard. All my life, I’ve known I wasn’t much. Every girl knows it in her own way. But those gentleman authors seem to believe they’re the first to have discovered the absolute torment of being an intelligent woman in this day and age, or any other. To be unseen and unheard is a tragedy of the first order, yet women routinely endure it.”

At the back of the dime novels are published letters written by actual readers, young women asking for help. Many of their complaints describe “me too” moments at work, instances of domestic abuse, and other forms of exploitation. Following those letters are advertisements for women’s health, predominantly thinly veiled abortion-related products—potions, monthly pills, apparatuses, and the post office box addresses of doctors who would discreetly, and no doubt lucratively, provide such services. The real life of the young women of that earlier era was far different from the romanticized version in the novels they loved.

When Victoria attempts to tell the true tales of young women, we sense that her skills as a writer are better suited to her romances. Purple prose remains her forte. But the impulse is there. As it was for me as a teenager, and as it is to this day. I’ve written novels and short stories that tell different stories set in different lands and eras, but they all try for the thing that Victoria wants as well: to convey things as they really are. To accurately portray the struggles faced by the determined young women of the late 1800s. To reveal the passion of a woman writer who wants to say more. To capture the mystery and longing of a snowy morning in May. My character and I—and I believe most writers—do our very best to bear witness to life as it appears out a window at dawn with all the surprise, heartache, and beauty of being alive.

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Virginia Pye’s fourth book of fiction, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann, was published by Regal House in October 2023. Virginia’s story collection Shelf Life of Happiness (Press 53) won the 2019 Independent Publishers Gold Medal for Short Fiction. Her two post-colonial novels about Americans in early twentieth-century China, Dreams of the Red Phoenix and River of Dust (Unbridled Books, 2013 and 2015), also received literary awards. Virginia’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, Literary Hub, Publisher’s Weekly, Writer’s Digest, The Rumpus, Huffington Post, Cleveland Plain-Dealer and elsewhere. Virginia has taught writing at New York University and the University of Pennsylvania, and, most recently, at Grub Street Writing Center in Boston. 

You can order signed copies of her books from Belmont Books. 

Please visit her at www.virginiapye.com