Talland House, written by Maggie Humm, is a historical fiction novel. The book was released on August 18, 2020. Today, I’m excited to share with you this Q&A with Maggie Humm. Plus, don’t miss out on the IG giveaway and enter for a chance to win a paperback copy.
Thank you so much, Smith Publicity, for gifting me the book and giving me the opportunity to interview Maggie Humm. 🙂
Maggie Humm, Author of Talland House
Q: What inspired you to write Talland House?
Maggie Humm: From her birth in 1882, Virginia Woolf enjoyed the happiest summers of her life in Talland House from which she visited Godrevy lighthouse, inspiring her novel To the Lighthouse. After the death of her mother Julia in 1895 the family sold the lease. Woolf recreates these thirteen summers in To the Lighthouse. The sudden death of Mrs. Ramsay in the novel, mentioned only in parentheses, is one of the most shocking deaths in twentieth-century literature.
My mother was forty-nine when she died, and I was thirteen, the same ages as Julia Stephen and Virginia, when Julia died, which I discovered when becoming a Woolf scholar, and only then realising why To the Lighthouse had such an effect on me when I first read the novel as an adolescent. I had to discover how Mrs. Ramsay died and wrote Talland House.
My heroine is Lily Briscoe from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and tells her story, as a prequel and in the interstices of Woolf’s novel, interwoven with fictional versions of Woolf’s life, friends, and family.
Q: Describe your main character in 3 words.
MH: Lily is independent, creative, loyal.
Q: What was the most challenging part to write in this book?
MH: The most challenging aspect was to keep several plot lines (the love interest, the murder mystery) interweaving throughout the novel and each coming to a satisfactory conclusion for the reader.
Q: What was your favorite part, and why?
MH: The scene where Lily (with the help of another character an elderly former pharmacist Mrs Beckwith) solves the mystery of Mrs Ramsay’s death. Mr Ramsay is absent from Talland House for the day but may return at any time and I felt so tense for Lily and Mrs Beckwith when writing the scene and hopefully the reader will share my tension.
Q: What’s a typical writing day for you?
MH: The only thing typical about my writing day is that I like to grapple with writing requests immediately (after a visit to the gym). My writings are so varied. During lockdown I’ve written an account of George Duckworth (Woolf’s half-brother) visit to Woolwich my London borough in May 1900 and the surprising things he did there; an account of one lockdown day for Mass Observation, UK; several blogs, a book review, a reader report and rewriting my next novel Rodin’s Mistress as well as publicity for Talland House.
I can only write for two hours at a time before needing to escape into cooking/cleaning during which activity I can review in my mind what I need to write next. My days are very full!
Q: Where do you like writing and why? Favorite snacks and/or beverages?
MH: I write everything longhand first on a large Saarinen dining room table and then retreat to a tiny bedroom, duplicating as my office, to type. As a child we only had one main room for everything: eating/TV/homework/reading/pets/sewing clothes/ and I find it hard to break the habit of writing surrounded by busy people.
Snacks are multigrain rice cakes but sustained by extremely large cups of milky café latte.
Q: What was your last 5-star read and why?
MH: Another historical fiction! Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, short listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, is a moving story of Shakespeare’s wife Agnes in Stratford who escapes Shakespeare’s shadow to become an inspirational healer and independent woman. The final theatre scene is one of the finest endings in a current novel.
Q: How would your main character fare with a stay-at-home order?
Like me, Lily is fairly self-subsistent and would manage to continue her art, albeit at a slower pace. She probably would not be as obsessed with checking social media as me (but in Lily’s time -1900 – the equivalent would be between six and twelve postal deliveries a day in London).
Q: What author or story inspired you growing up or inspired you in some ways?
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse was my inspiration. As a child I found Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical children’s books inspirational especially Eagle of the Ninth set in Roman Britain in the 2nd century AD, by Hadrian’s Wall, near where I was born.
Q: Is there anything you can tell us about the book that is not a spoiler and not on the blurb? Something you’d like to share with us?
Reading Talland House, you will stand alongside Lily witnessing the slashing of The Rokeby Venus painting in the National Gallery by a suffragette. I hope you find the episode as shocking as does Lily.
Synopsis
Royal Academy, London 1919: Lily has put her student days in St. Ives, Cornwall, behind her―a time when her substitute mother, Mrs. Ramsay, seemingly disliked Lily’s portrait of her and Louis Grier, her tutor, never seduced her as she hoped he would. In the years since, she’s been a suffragette and a nurse in WWI, and now she’s a successful artist with a painting displayed at the Royal Academy. Then Louis appears at the exhibition with the news that Mrs. Ramsay has died under suspicious circumstances. Talking to Louis, Lily realizes two things: 1) she must find out more about her beloved Mrs. Ramsay’s death (and her sometimes-violent husband, Mr. Ramsay), and 2) She still loves Louis.
Set between 1900 and 1919 in picturesque Cornwall and war-blasted London, Talland House takes Lily Briscoe from the pages of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and tells her story outside the confines of Woolf’s novel — as a student in 1900, as a young woman becoming a professional artist, her loves and friendships, mourning her dead mother, and solving the mystery of her friend Mrs. Ramsay’s sudden death.
An engaging and original work of romantic historical fiction and the debut novel from renowned international Virginia Woolf scholar and Emeritus Professor at the University of East London Maggie Humm, Talland House is both a story for our present time, exploring the tensions women experience between their public careers and private loves, and a story of a specific moment in our past — a time when women first began to be truly independent.
Add To Your Goodreads – Available for purchase
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR TALLAND HOUSE
*** Shortlisted for the Impress Prize, Fresher
Fiction Prize, Retreat West Prize and Eyelands Prize ***
*** Longlisted for the 2019 Historical Writers’ Association /
Sharpe Books Unpublished Novel Award ***
“Maggie Humm has brilliantly filled in the edges beyond Woolf’s canvas; she has a deep, awe-inspiring understanding of the role of the visual in Woolf’s work, and here she reveals that she also has a novelist’s gift to create something new, that has its own imaginative life, from that understanding.” ―Lauren Elkin, award-winning author of Flâneuse
“I’ve really enjoyed Talland House . . . the novel is written with such a painterly eye I felt as if I too was seeing the world through Lily Briscoe’s eyes. It is a wonderfully visual novel and the Cornish scenes are gorgeously evoked.” ―Annabel Abbs, author of the award-winning The Joyce Girl and Frieda
“Evocative of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in the way [Humm] represents the tensions between nostalgia and the passing of time. The primary setting of St Ives in Cornwall is beautifully depicted and subtly realised, without resorting to cliché or relying on Woolf’s vivid descriptions, creating a language of the writer’s own. . . . The atmosphere of the novel is dreamy. . . .” ―Historical Writers Association
“It’s evocative and engaging, sweeping landscapes simmering next to psychological interior exploration. Picturesque Cornwall and busy London are the backdrop for a young woman growing up, and an older woman reflecting back. We’re treated to details about the captivating Lily Briscoe and her relationship with herself, her art, and the women and men in her life. It’s a great read, from a clearly very knowledgeable writer.” ―Francesca Baker, book reviewer at AndSoSheThinks.co.uk
“I hope that Maggie Humm knows that every time I read her work, I’m so startled by its brilliance all over again.” ― Amy E. Elkins, writer for PMLA, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Journal of Modern Literature, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, South Atlantic Review, and The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945
About the author: Maggie Humm
Maggie Humm is an Emeritus Professor, University of East London, UK. An international Virginia Woolf scholar and the author/editor of fourteen books (the last three focused on Woolf and the arts), Humm is a former Co-Chair of the British Women’s Studies Association, founded the first full-time undergraduate UK Women’s Studies degree, and was a judge of the Fawcett Society book prize. To transition to creative writing, she earned a diploma in Creative Writing from the prestigious programme launched by the University of East Anglia in partnership with the Guardian, followed by mentorship with The Literary Consultancy. She contributed a programme note for the ‘Woolf Works’ ballet at the Royal Opera House and a catalogue essay for the major Woolf exhibition at the Tate St Ives, as well as speaking there at a conference.
Talland House is Humm’s debut novel. Shortlisted for the Impress and Fresher Fiction prizes (as Who Killed Mrs. Ramsay?) and Retreat West and Eyelands prizes, and longlisted for the Lucy Cavendish and Historical Writers’ Association / Sharpe Books Unpublished Novel Awards, Talland House is set for official release in August 2020 with She Writes Press.
She lives in London and is currently writing Rodin’s Mistress about the tumultuous love affair of the artists Gwen John and Rodin.
WEBSITE & SOCIAL LINKS
Website: www.maggiehumm.net
Twitter: @maggiehumm1
Instagram: @HummMaggie
Facebook:facebook.com/maggie.humm.7
Goodreads:goodreads.com/author/show/67292.Maggie_Humm
