As a kid, her favorite writer was Louisa May Alcott, and most of her limited excursions into fiction writing as a child involved trying to ape Alcott’s style. Harkness grew up in the countryside outside Philadelphia, the bookish daughter of a paint-store manager and a British-born secretary. I can either be frustrated as a historian or intrigued as a storyteller.” This is the perfect jumping-off point for a novel. “It really is lost - I’ve looked for it that’s its real title. “It really exists,” she says of the alchemy chronicle known as Ashmole 782, one of a large cache of manuscripts collected and cataloged by 17th century bibliophile and alchemy enthusiast Elias Ashmole. The mysterious document that catalyzes a lot of the action in “A Discovery of Witches” shows how differently a historian and novelist operate. You have to rewire your brain, in a way.” I needed to be able to shed that, to let the history serve the story rather than have the history bind the story. “As a historian you can only go as far as the evidence will take you. Some of the muscles used by historians and novelists, though, are quite different. “And I have really good material to work with: I’ve been studying magic and the occult since about 1983.” Overall, she says, trying to graft a 16th century worldview onto a 21st century setting - with characters, conflict and romance - was “a gas.” “I’m a storyteller,” she says of an impulse shared by her scholarship and fiction writing. She’s written two previous scholarly books of history, both driven by historical figures and narrative. Some things about writing a novel came naturally for Harkness. And Diana attracts not only the attention of a host of pesky creatures but the dark eyes of a brilliant and terrifying vampire whose quiet charisma she works hard to resist. Humans know about these creatures but keep their distance: There’s an uneasy detente, with stereotypes, wariness and even bigotry in the mix.īut mostly, life goes on, until the novel’s scholarly protagonist and primary narrator, Diana Bishop, comes across an elusive medieval document, long thought lost, which might hold the secrets of eternal life. The result of her inquiry is her first novel, “A Discovery of Witches,” which starts out in a contemporary England in which witches, vampires, daemons and humans fight for good light in Oxford University’s libraries and even sometimes attend the same yoga class. What if 16th century people were right, and the supernatural and natural coexisted? How would that play out? It started out almost like a kind of logic problem.” We think of ourselves as having very little in common with people in 1558. “People believed that the supernatural and the natural existed, intermingled. The whole thing felt to her like a throwback - a throwback of 450 years.
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