Julia Oliver

Q: Writing historical fiction seems to present a double challenge—a writer has to create a story with compelling characters and get the history right. How long had you researched Winnie Davis before, for you as a novelist, her story emerged from the facts of her life? Was there a key moment when you realized her life could be written as a novel?
A: That moment occurred when I came across a brief reference to the fact that a daughter of Jefferson Davis had almost married a Yankee. The idea that I should be the one to write the novel also came to me then, but I didn't commit to the project until after I had done a considerable amount of research, which included visits to the Richmond White House of the Confederacy, where Winnie was born, and Beauvoir, near Biloxi, Mississippi, where she had lived with her parents.

Q: Are there actually any surviving personal writings—diaries or letters—by Winnie?
A: Some of Winnie's correspondence with her parents, friends, and acquaintances, and her published essays and articles are archived at various institutions—but as far as I could discern, there are no journals or diaries in accessible collections. I felt a real connection with her while reading her novels. I purchased the first one, The Veiled Doctor, from an antique books dealer on the Internet and obtained the second, A Romance of Summer Seas, through Interlibrary Loan.

Q: Winnie Davis was certainly a complex and interesting woman. What was it specifically about her that made you want to tackle writing a fictional account of her life?
A: Her history presented a curious dichotomy. A cosmopolitan, intellectual "New Woman" who lived most of her relatively brief life outside the American South, Winnie Davis was also a cultural icon of the South's Lost Cause. Artists who painted portraits of her seemed to be influenced by different aspects of her persona. One would depict her as warmly sensuous, another as coolly aloof—but all of these beguiling images project an inscrutable sense of mystery and a poignant vulnerability.

Q: What were some of the most surprising things you learned about Winnie or the people close to her?
A: Although I was resolved not to allow Winnie's famous parents to take over the story, I admit to becoming enthralled, early on in the research, with the dynamics of that marriage. Respected and admired for her intellect and wit, Varina Howell Davis made enemies easily, but her innate optimism and self-confidence kept her going. She outlived five of her six children. Winnie's sister Margaret emerged as one of the most interesting and definitive characters. Another epiphany in this combined research and imagining was getting to know Fred Wilkinson and his family and especially his stoic romanticism as a man destined to love only one woman.

Q: What do you think the modern diagnoses of Winnie's ailments and her cause of death would be?
A: She had been on a trip to Egypt and Europe with the Joseph Pulitzers a few months before she became ill with what was called malarial gastritis. It's been suggested that she may have picked up a strain of a foreign disease. If, as sources indicate, she was unable to retain nourishment during those last weeks, she could have died from malnutrition. In the current terminology, Winnie might be diagnosed as being manic-depressive.

Q: How did you settle on the Rashomon-like device of telling Winnie's story through multiple narrators?
A: I wanted Winnie to tell part of her story. Since she would die before the novel ended, it seemed right to have the other narrators use first-person perspective also.

Q: You've written one short story collection, Seventeen Times as High as the Moon, and two previous novels, Goodbye to the Buttermilk Sky and Music of Falling Water. You've also written two plays, Strings and Many Winters, Many Moons. How has writing historical fiction compared with other writing you've done?
A: The fifteen short stories in the collection and the play Strings are contemporary (or were when I wrote them, in the 1980s and early 1990s). I seem to have an affinity for setting longer works of fiction in past eras. Buttermilk Sky takes place over the summer of 1938; Music of Falling Water is a literary, family-saga mystery set in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Many Winters, Many Moons is about a Native American woman as she prepares to leave Alabama on the infamous Trail of Tears.

Q: Are there works of historical fiction that inspired you to write this book? Who are some writers you admire?
A: Reading the works of other novelists is a constant source of inspiration for me, but in this instance, I just felt a call to turn what appeared to be an obscure bit of history into an illuminating narrative. Among historical fiction that has made a lasting impression on me are two of the first novels I ever read: The Return of the Native, by Thomas Hardy, and Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë. Exceptional novels I have enjoyed and admired in the last couple of years include Enemy Women, by Paulette Jiles; The Great Fire, by Shirley Hazzard; Any Human Heart, by William Boyd, and Colm Tóibín's The Master.