 Online, Near Wife, a Novel by J. R. Thorpe, who will be in conversation with Philippa Kelly, dramaturg in residence at California Shakespeare Theater. I'm Laura Shepherd, Director of Events at the Mechanics Institute, and we're very proud to co-sponsor this event with Cal Shakes and with the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning. If you're new to the Mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854 and we're one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. We feature our beautiful General Interest Library, an international chess club, and ongoing author and literary programs, and for you film buffs, our cinemalits film series on Friday night. Please visit our website at milibrary.org and also visit us in person at 57 Post Street in San Francisco. Our doors are open. So we're very pleased to welcome our two esteemed guests for this program and this new novel. Near Wife is inspired, of course, by Shakespeare's King Lear and this breathtaking debut novel tells the story of the most famous woman ever written out of literary history. Near Wife is a breathtaking novel of loss, renewal, and how history leads into the present. It's gorgeously written, very poetic, and we're very pleased to welcome J.R. Thorpe from Ireland. She is a writer, lyricist, and librettist. She won the London Short Story Award in 2011 and was shortlisted for the BBC Opening Lines Prize and has also worked published in the Cambridge Literary Review, the Manchester Review, Antithesis, Wave Composition, and in other publications. She wrote the libretto for the highly-acclaimed modern opera, Dear Marie Stopes, which you can also see some trailers on YouTube and has worked commissioned by the Arts Council, The Welcome Trust, and St. Paul's Cathedral. She's also a Claritin scholar at Oxford where she completed her PhD and she's also an Aussie and now living in Cork, Ireland. Our host and moderator today is Philippa Kelly. As I mentioned, is the resident dramaturg at California Shakespeare Theatre. She has published 11 books and 98 articles on her latest being Diversity, Inclusion, and Representation in Contemporary Dramaturgies, Case Studies from the Field. She is proud to lead a year-round community theater group entitled the Berkeley Theater Explorations. And the purpose is to make dramaturgy foundational to community theater appreciation. In other words, to make theater going an active practice rather than a passive form of consumption. Also, I wanna mention that Philippa posts the in-depth conversations on Shakespeare's plays and you can see a link either on their website or if you'd like to be in touch with her directly to find out about the next series of lectures which will be in July, please see her email in the chat. Also, Cal Shakespeare will be presenting an adaptation of King Lear in the fall. So watch their website and please make your reservations and get to the theater. So I also wanna mention, if you'd like to buy a book, please purchase at alexandabook.com or at an independent bookstore near you. And also we will engage you, our audience, in a chat and conversation after our program. So please welcome J.R. Thorpe and Philippa Kelly. Thank you so much for having me. It's so wonderful to, obviously I can't see all the faces of the participants, but it's very lovely to be able to speak to you from so far away. And actually it's lovely, we often do these as a webinar but actually right now we can see a lot of faces around the top of the screen, including the beautiful face of this genius J.R. Thorpe who at the age of 33 has done so much, accomplished so much and has published this internationally, reviewed and hugely praised book, Lear Wife. So it's really lovely that you've made the time to speak with us, J.R. And I'll just ask, in County Cork, what time is it now? Right now it is 10 past eight in the evening and because we are far enough north, it is still bright sunlight outside. Yeah, oh lovely. So we're at midday. So just to begin on a couple of points that are really intriguing. First of all, what was your, what drew you to King Lear as your kind of ur text, everybody, the ur text, the sort of original text? Well, I actually, like I'm sure many other people did, I studied King Lear in high school and we did a very particular focus on it which was to look at how many different ways it could be interpreted. So we looked at it as a family drama, we looked at it as a political drama we looked at it as a particular artistic statement about the ways in which memories work and we watched many different productions of it, some of which I'm sure a lot of people have seen, the Ian Holm version and the, I was 16 and the impact of it never really left me. I just thought it was at its heart, a really, really interesting family drama. And I read A Thousand Acres, A Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer Prize winning interpretation of it which takes that aspect, relocates it to rural America to brutal and beautiful effect. And I also, when I was 19, I saw Ian McKellen as King Lear at the Royal Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon. So it was one of those places that I kept coming back to. I kept thinking about it and eventually I had this idea of trying to find where the mother might be in this. And when I initially had the idea, I thought, well, someone else has come up with this. Clearly this is an idea that has been done before. I'd like to find who has. And oddly enough, it hadn't really. And then, well, the book happened. So when you sat down, JR, when you say the book happened, I mean, many people listening today will think, but I've been trying to make a book happen for 50 years. How does it happen? It happened. For you. For me it happened over five years because I was working full-time. I did my masters and then I did my PhD. And then I thought I'd really like to get this idea onto paper. But I was working full-time as a journalist. So it took five years of working in the evenings, on a weekend, and without an agent, without any outside support in that sense, just deciding that it was a good idea and that I wanted to keep going. And see what happened. And really the book is just the result of me being incredibly stubborn. I think is the best way to put it. This will happen. It doesn't matter if it's good or not. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, there's a tiny bit of noise from here, but that's just disappearing now. So just to say, I'm really, this interview is not about me, but I just have to say that when I initially was introduced to Leah, it was also in Australia. I was 14. And that play formed the foundation of my life so that three books and countless articles later, I'm still obsessing about Leah. And one of the things that I was really moved by by a philosopher called Karen Armstrong, was she was talking about her relationship to Catholicism and to life. And she said, what we human beings need to learn to do is to dethrone ourselves from the center of the universe. And I just love that quote in relationship to King Leah. But what you've done even further is to put the queen back in the center, if not on the throne. So JR's queen has been twice married. Leah is her second husband. And I'll ask you to say a little bit more about the foundations of your Leah queen. So the queen herself came from the shape of her life as it were, came from a variety of different sources. Cause I decided quite early on that if this woman were missing, there had to be a reason. And she has mentioned twice in the play, very, very small offhand references, which indicate that Leah believes her to be dead. And that's almost an unbelievable erasure. I went back to the original story that Shakespeare took his Leah from, which is the chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth. There's no wife in there either. It's almost as if Shakespeare and the chronicle had decided that a mother and a wife wasn't necessary, that the figures were moving around in their own dramas so succinctly that there was no, that figure wasn't required. But I looked at Leah and the three daughters as people who had been continuing a pattern clearly for a very long time. If we look at the first scene of King Leah, the very famous one where the daughters are told to tell how much they love Leah and they will get something in return. And Kjordelia, of course, refuses to play. That is a game that clearly they have been playing for a very long time. Everyone knows what they are meant to do. And for the very first time, Kjordelia says that she's not going to do it, but it got me thinking, who taught them this game? Where did this game come from? And why has it been going on for so long? And so I came up with the idea that maybe the queen was a contributing factor in this bizarre competitive family dynamic and made her into this figure who taught Leah a lot of the things that he knew that competed violently with her daughters for love and attention. And also I looked to a lot of medieval queens. Eleanor of Aquitaine was also married multiple times. She managed to have sons, which Leah managed never to do, and was locked up in an abbey for being a political thord in her second husband's side. So there were a lot of contributing ideas, some of which came from the play, some of which came from historical research. And they all kind of merged together into the figure of Leah-wife. That's wonderful. And I'll just say to everybody, one of the things about Shakespeare's lack of older women was that as most of you would know, the women were not allowed to perform on the stage. So young boys would have to perform older parts. And so you get most mothers in Shakespeare, Hermione in Winter's Tale, Taísa in Pericles, they're either buried, lost at sea, buried for 16 years, or have been dead way before the play. And so that's just been the way that the mother in Leah has been institutionally internalized. But to have her actually be buried within the convent is such a beautiful idea. And the fact that Leah, who has thought that he, I mean, at one part in Shakespeare's play, he says, they taught me I was everything. They told me that I had white hairs ere the gray hairs were there. So to have J.R. uplift her knowledge and to place that in counterpoint to this king who realizes how little he has known, what a beautiful idea this is. Thank you. I'm glad that it's, I think it enters into an interesting tradition of women's voices in classics that have been cut out or have not been seen as necessary, but who can add something really entertaining? Yes. And so J.R., when you were thinking about the women in the play, did you ever consider as Jane Smiley did? And by the way, Jane Smiley gave this book a beautiful review, but did you ever consider giving the voice to the daughters before you landed on the mother? No, I actually, I was always set on the mother as the central point because she sees herself so much as Leah does as the center of the universe. She sees herself as the fixed point around which everything else revolves, around which Leah revolves, Kent revolves, the kingdom revolves, her children, and as it turns out in the book, the convent. She believes that she should be the center of power, the crux around which all gravity rotates. And that makes her a very fundamentally interesting and sometimes quite unlikable person. And we know Gondal and Reagan, don't we? We know Gondal and Reagan and we know Cordelia. They have very famous lines. They have abilities to speak for themselves. They've always, they're, and often they're quite clear in many ways that one of my favorite bits in King Leah is when Leah says, I gave you all. And one of the daughters says, and in good time you gave it. Yes. And that encapsulates their whole dynamic, the whole history of the family. Yeah. So they have their chance to talk. Yeah. The mother never did. Yeah. And so this was my pulling her out of that dark space. Yes. And I love that thought. It reminds me of your line that something like, when my daughters were born, I reached for their bodies and said yes. And she's never allowed that yes during Leah's lifetime. She's only allowed it after everybody's dead. Yeah. In many ways I wanted to make a book about grief and about what grief would feel like for someone whose world has been completely shattered, who's completely ended. This is a woman who has lost everything. She was taken away from her children. She doesn't understand why she's in the convent. And that's a secret I will not spoil if you haven't read the, if you haven't read the novel. And she's just told by messenger that her husband and her three daughters are dead. And what does that do to a woman, particularly a woman who used to be incredibly powerful? Yeah. And that's also a really big influence on the story I was trying to tell. Yes. And it's interesting just thinking, I think you're probably a bit of a Shakespeare scholar because even when I was looking through passages in the book just before, you know, re-reading them before today, I was thinking about there's a line where you say like a woman picking reeds in a river. And then that took me to Hamlet. And so I wanted to ask, did you feel also the resonances of other plays coming into your story? And for instance, other Shakespeare mothers like Hermione buried for 16 years, like Taiza who is believed to be dead in a wreck at sea. Did you feel them coming in or were you really, was that just sort of almost by accident? I think he was, I did an enormous amount of reading partly because I wanted to see what echoes of mother and wife there might be in other plays that Shakespeare had taken on that I could pull in for little hooks for linguistic echoes. Because that's something I really enjoyed with Lea White was putting in little aspects of the play linguistically that you might recognize, but that I've changed to reflect who Lea White is as a person or her role. So nothing shows up a lot in Lea White. And it's a big theme in King Lea. And here it's very much about her grief and what to do when there is nothing at the centre of your life when formerly there were, you know, there was a family. And that's kind of where I looked to other plays was to go, okay, what here can inform what I'm doing without, you know, becoming a pastiche or becoming a parody or anything like that. Yes. And I love the way she refers to herself as the womb of the kingdom. So she feels that she is the generative centre and then she's been pushed away to this realm of, you know, complete celibacy from being a womb to being a nun. And so just thinking also she, like the wives of Henry VIII, like, you know, so many very upper shelf women of that time, one of the things that was most important that also they had no control over was to produce a male heir. And so when I think about, I wonder how much rage she feels about the fact that she hasn't managed to do that or whether you feel like she is raging more at the society which expects that form of primogenity. Well, it's interesting because in many ways I wanted to make her quite a conservative figure, you know. She rails a lot against the idea that she herself cannot carry power, that she shouldn't be the one in charge. But when it comes to things like sons and passing things on to sons, I made it quite clear that that is something that she desperately wanted in part because she is very much in love with Leah and that's what Leah wants. And, you know, this, this, the idea of tradition in that sense imprisoned her in many ways. She's like many women that you'll meet who perpetuate things that actively harm them because it's the way things have always been and they know no other way of doing things. And I'm sure that if she had had a son she would have tried to find a way to manipulate them and, you know, rule things anyway. But it was getting a very careful balance between here is a woman who rebels against her circumstance but not so much that it's going to seem unreal, that it's going to seem as if I'm putting a modern person in a situation that they would try to escape from. She still had to believe enough in what she was in her environment and in the trappings of kingship and everything like that to commit fully to what she was trying to do. Yes, and I also love your, what you just said before about queens in history before Shakespeare and actually during his time where if they didn't have sons how could they get power? And very often, as with his, you know, famous crone queen Margaret, they got their power through marrying their sons off at a ridiculously young age or if they had only daughters marry, you know, at least betrothing them as young as seven or eight. And so for this woman, she's never had any power over her daughters for the last 15 years. Yeah, and it's a perspective that I wanted to make sure was very clear that there's only so much power that you can have in that scenario. Even if you are the most powerful woman in the country, which she was, there are limits. There are places where that you cannot go, where your ability not to bear a son will mean that you fail. And through Gonaral and Reagan and Cordelia, I'm kind of imagining their lives before the events of the play. I kind of looked at various different ways that that could play out. Why Gonaral was married to the person she was married to, why Reagan was married to the person that she was married to and why they don't have dowries. Because that's also the thing about clear when in that very first scene, he's dividing up his kingdom for the first time. Like he's giving away power for the first time in his life. Before that, his children have had basically nothing because they're girls and they've been married to powerful men. This is the first time he goes, okay, well now maybe I'll give you something. And Leah's given to the sons-in-law because dukes were conferred by royal in earls were born, but the daughters have had to basically just been, they've been sort of ladies-in-waiting. I can't help thinking about whether Shakespeare was influenced in some way in his play by the fact that when Catherine of Aragon's daughter, Mary was born, she was the princess royal. At the age of 17, when Henry VIII had dumped Catherine and taken on Anne Boleyn, Mary was forced at 17 years old to be the lady-in-waiting to this infant. I mean, the history of this time is so full of rage. It is. And it's interesting to see how things change between Geoffrey of Monmouth's Leah and what Shakespeare does with it because the original story is quite different. There are three daughters. It does end with them rejecting him, but Cordelia is much more powerful in the original chronicle. Cordelia is a player. She's getting in there. She comes back to it. She tries to save Leah. It becomes, it's a much more present relationship. She isn't just taken off to France. Yeah. And so Shakespeare clearly saw in this figure this woman who says, no, I don't want to play anymore and is immediately sold off to France. A really interesting thing to put on stage at that time. Yeah. And how it might resound with people in that audience. Yes. Really interesting. Yes. By the way, everybody, just so you know, you'll have plenty of time for questions. We're not going to, you know, take up the whole time. So have your questions ready. Can I just, as an Australian, ask you what took you, well, firstly to study at Oxford and then to live in Cork in Ireland? Well, I went from, I went on exchange from Australia to, to the UK when I was 19. That was when I saw Rian McKellen. I went to the university of East Anglia, which has a really famous, really wonderful creative writing program. And I fell in love with the country. As a lot of expert Australians do, you move to England and suddenly it's like all of these story books have come to life. And so when it came time to do my masters, I applied to Oxford, to their creative writing program, which is amazing. And I moved there. And then I did what sometimes happens, which is I met the love of my life and I stayed. And I got married and I did my, I did my PhD and they then in 2018 got a job in Cork. And so we moved to Cork and have been there ever, have been here ever since throughout the pandemic, throughout everything. And this is why, if you're wondering why my accent doesn't sound fully Australian, this is wrong. I haven't lived in Australia since 2009. I do sound much more Australian when I get angry or when I'm very tired. And so my only memory of Cork is, it was so beautiful, but diving into the water and having a headache for half an hour afterwards because it's so cold. It has been an adjustment as an Australian. It has been an adjustment, but it is, it's also, it's more like Australia than the UK is, I have to say Ireland, because people swear more here and people are very, very friendly, which are two things that I miss a lot about Australia. It is, it's also very beautiful here. And there's a very strong arts and literature, literature scene here. So I've been lucky enough to get a grant from the Irish Arts Council to write my second novel. And I've only lived here since 2018, but they very much adopted me as, no, you're an Irish writer now. You're living here and you write. So you clearly must be Irish. Okay. All right. And probably we Australians are, most of us descended from the Irish because, you know, a couple of centuries ago, they sent out all of their poverty stricken people that they designated criminals. So my mother's heritage on both sides is actually as convicts. Oh, amazing. My lot, my lot were just poor and left in the early 1800s to find a better life in Australia, which I guess has worked out. Yeah. But now I'm back, which is very confusing for the whole timeline, but. And so just thinking about the arts scene, another question I want to ask you is that I noticed that you're, and I really feel this in your book. You're a librettist. And so your words feel very lyrical. And I was wondering how much your, your, your parallel career as a librettist has informed your writing. A great deal. I'd have to say a lot of the professional training I've done, which is what a master's and a PhD in creative writing is, you know, it's, it's like long apprenticeships to learn how to do this stuff professionally. A lot of it was in poetry and in poetic form and in the manipulation of language, which is why the book is so, I've made it so full of imagery and, and so language based because that's what I really enjoy doing. But it was very important to me when this book is read aloud, it sounds good. Every sentence has to have the right rhythm. Everything has to move in the right way. And fortunately the amazing Juliet Stevenson, the actress did the audiobook of this, which if anyone is into, into audio books, I highly recommend. She's a Shakespearean actress. And she gives the rhythm of it such life and interest and brings out so much of, of what I've put on the page. It's just gorgeous. And I know that, I know that sometimes that's, it can be dense to read, but it's, it's, it's a book that I designed that you read a little bit and then you go away and then you come back and you're a little bit more and you go away because that's the sort of book I really love to read. And it's interesting JR because I have my own hard copy, but I, when I realized how lyrical it is, I then bought an audible copy. So I love to listen and Juliet Stevenson, she's so amazing. I love to listen to her read. So I'd highly recommend to everybody go to Amazon and buy it or use one of your credits or whatever to get it, get on audible. Let's see. I just saw something in the chat. Okay. Let me just have a quick look. So Maxine asks, because Leah's wife is only in her 50s, Leah can no longer be seen as senile since he was younger than her. That's a great question. Through this prism, we now see him as downright cruel to abandon his wife after the birth of Cordelia. And so Maxine says, why did you make these choices? But another thing I would say is that in Leah itself, in Shakespeare's Leah, we're never sure about how far Leah is mentally gone or not gone. And in fact, the two older daughters center that question at the very end of scene one, where one of them says to the other, you notice how full of changes his age is. And the other says he had ever been thus. So Shakespeare really wanted us to not know whether we could blame any of his conduct on senility. For instance, he is the most misogynist character in the whole of Shakespeare. Women only really take a presence for him beyond the first scene in terms of being the sites of venereal disease. So just thinking about that, could you talk about the age of Leah and the fact that he's not four score years and upward? And how that impacts your storytelling? Well, I made originally, Leah White was going to be older. Originally, when the book first went to the agent, she was older than she currently was, and so the timeline was more extended. But we contracted it after some discussion because A, I liked the idea of her being a bit more vigorous, younger, more capable of taking charge and running around doing some of the completely ludicrous things that she does in the convent. But also because I very much like a reading of the play where what really destabilizes Leah is not age, it's what he perceives as betrayal. He is a leader that we've seen in so many ways appears to have positioned himself on uniform obedience, on everyone doing exactly what he says, except for the fool. The fool is the only person who's allowed to poke in anyway. And it is that. And it's particularly his daughters, his beautiful daughters who have said that they love him dearly and above all else, above their husbands for years and years and years. When that is taken away from him, that is what I like to view the play as destabilizing him. That is what sends him out raving on the heath, yelling about ungrateful daughters and serpents' teeth for children. Because there's such psychological power in what Shakespeare has set up that it can work as long as the daughters are adult at any age. When you have a figure like Leah with these daughters and that relationship as it goes in the play, he doesn't need to be for school years and 10. He just needs to be old enough to feel as if he has built all this up and is watching it crumble around him. I love that thought. And it's interesting, you know, just thinking about that. I'm doing an in-depth course that will be... that will certainly begin with Leah for Cal Shakespeare's Middle of July. And thinking about some amazing things that have been built lately on the back of Kim Leah. Firstly, Leah's wife. I'm going to be asking you to come back for an interview. And then succession. That is the Leah story. The father starring Sir Anthony Hopkins. I don't know whether anybody on this Zoom has seen the father. But again, it's so beautiful the way that movie takes the idea of abandonment and places it, in that case, side by side with senility. And has the daughter going off to France. There are just so many beautiful things at the moment. Interestingly, Brian Cox, the star of succession, performed Leah in, I think, 1992. And he performed Leah in a wheelchair. And he said the reason he chose the wheelchair was he was starting to, you know, going to the airport. He was noticing how so many people would come in, wheeled on wheelchairs, go to the front of the queue, and then they'd get out of the wheelchair and they'd be their sprightly selves again. So he started to realize how age or the appearance of age didn't have to be only a vulnerability, but could be pivoted to make it a strength. That's also something. And that's also something that Leah does when he's open with his daughters. He uses that as a manipulation technique. He's emphasizing how old he is and how weak he is. And realistically, that is just something that he is using in the moment to try and control the women around him. And that doesn't have to be the truth of what's happening. In fact, it's almost more interesting if it isn't. Yes. And so just before we go to questions, could I ask you, JR, could you give us a teaser for your next novel? The next novel is very different. It is set in the near future. And it's in the 2030s. And it's about the refugee crisis in Europe, but it's about the helpers, not the refugees themselves, but the translators, the couriers, the charity workers, and that sort of thing, which I think is a very universal sort of story that hasn't been heard a lot. Although recently one of the, I believe the National Book Award finalists, the wrong end of the telescope is fabulous if anyone is interested in that sort of, in those sorts of stories. So that's the next project, something very different. And then the third novel is back to historical fiction again. So I'm ping-ponging. And the historical fiction for the third, do we have a teaser for that yet? That's going to be in 1600s Nuremberg. I like variety. What can I say? Well, and then the very last thing before we go to questions. When you think of, say, the voice that you have for the Queen, I feel it's a very lyrical voice. Will you be shifting to another voice altogether? Or, I mean, it's so hard to tell at this point, I imagine. I like first person writing a great deal because you can do so much with the interior of someone's head, you know, what they're thinking and how that corresponds to the outside world. And so much of Leo wife is based on something happening to her and in her environment that then triggers a memory in her head. And so she is existing on these dual planes and it's really interesting to do that from first person. And she has a very distinctive, very bossy, very single-minded perspective. And for my second novel, I've gone with someone a bit more ambiguous, someone a bit quieter, a bit less sure of themselves. And that's been a really interesting challenge because I've inhabited this very certain idea about, you know, Leo wife and the world for such a long time that moving to a more kind of quiet perspective has been very different. And I'll let you know if it works. Because your queen has no place for self-doubt and no time for self-doubt. Or doubting anyone else. Yeah, yeah. So let's move to questions. Oh, Philippa, I'd like to jump in and I thought that before we go to questions, I'd like to have Jennifer read a passage from... Oh, yes. You know, I just want to say that, you know, and also my question is, JR, the way that you have constructed the style and the voice of the queen is so unique, so uniquely poetic. I just wanted you to comment on that, how you got to this voice. And then also to read us a passage before we jump into our Q&A. Absolutely fine. Well, first I'll talk about the voice and then I'll read. The voice was quite tricky because I wanted it to have that Shakespearean tone, but not be so dense and, I suppose, panickity and historical that it shut people out. And we've had so many good interpretations of historical fiction recently with Black Hillary Mantel and people like that who can still use the register but can still make it direct and beautiful enough that people can communicate with it in their own time and in their own language. But I used people like Patrick White and Michael Ondarci, who use very, very lyrical and poetic language and Anne Michaels, a Canadian writer who wrote fugitive pieces to kind of figure out the balance between imagery and personality. Because I didn't want her just to be a vehicle for saying pretty things. I wanted her to have a very distinct point of view. Even if sometimes that point of view is not very attractive, you still want to be there with her. I actually got quite a lot of, when the book came out in November, I got quite a lot of questions about, well, how does it feel writing such an unlikeable voice? And frankly, it's very freeing because so often as women, you are told to be very likable and Leah Wife does not care. She does not care if people like her. She's never met anyone that she would care if liked her. Leah's is really the only opinion she's ever cared about. And that was very fun to inhabit. Just someone who just does not care. And that's probably the main through line. But I'll read you a bit now from quite early on, which is Leah Wife's initial, her memories of what Gonaral and Reagan were like as children and young women. So, Gonaral, small, heavy-skulled, ferrine, fitful in her movements, knotting and unknotting across the stone floors and red, red to the nape of her neck. Though she tried citrus, barmed her freckles in creams and old milk and wept. Her plaits were the glossed orange of her father's youth before it fell into grizzling and gray. He loved this, the undeniable nature of paternal fate. I looked at her and saw orchards, the fullness of fruit. Tried to be graceful, but had too much dog in her, too much fretting, startled her and she'd tense motionless, an animal caught in the open at dusk. I told her, relax your spine, don't think so much, but you cannot train it out of them. That hunted sense. Reagan, white as paint, with coarse black hair. My own, so I taught her taming, the lines of it on her back, night wetting to smooth its wilderness. Every morning she rose and unbound her hair, wash of dark over her shoulder, and I would think God helped the man who sees this. Heron girl, full in the breasts, long and smooth with edgeless eyes. Small featured, like my mother, pass a hand over her face and the lips, the cheeks would barely rise under your fingers. Perhaps Cordelia was like this when she grew. That whiteness, that pale clay, when I slapped Reagan once on the neck, some small disobedience, she had arranged my pale cones in her own plaques, the marked rose and would not fade, high scarlet, like a bite. She wore low bodices to display it, flagrant, turning to the light at dinners. I ignored her, gave her pounded hazel for the burn. Later, goneral told me, whispering, always in my memory she is whispering, smothered, a giggle in the dark, that she had rubbed and pinched it every night to keep it virulent. Twisting her wound, bending to the glass to check it swell. So industrious in her spite. Beautiful. Thank you. I know I'm supposed to say that, but I mean it. And frankly, I think quite disturbing as well. But yes, that is a sample from, that's page 45 or so, quite early on in the novel. She's just starting to sort of think back on her girls and on what they were like as children and what her relationship with Lea was like. So yes, what questions does everyone have? Pam is going to read out the questions. And then also I wanted to show everyone, this is the US copy and book cover. It's been printed both separately in England and in Britain. And so we've got two various book covers here. Very beautiful. Yeah. Okay, so I'm going to read a question from Tom Lederer. The more the two of you spoke, the more I thought of a recent US president and the co-role of egocentrism rather than senility played in his and Lear's life and the responses of his various wives. Did you think of that person at all? Weirdly enough, no. But when I was writing it, I was working for a US website as a journalist and it was during Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. And I remember very clearly bringing out the character of Lea wife as this woman was being constantly criticized for not being powerful enough, for speaking too angrily, for not speaking angrily enough, for not performing power in exactly the right ways at exactly the right time, while the other person on the stage obviously did whatever he wanted. And the brutality of that response, of the media's response to a woman having the temerity, whether she deserved it or not, the temerity to want to be president. And that was very informative because that hasn't gone away. The idea of a woman nakedly wanting power, and Lea wife does, she nakedly wants and works for power in the Abbey and in her life, is still so alien and confronting to so many people. That informed it really, really strongly, actually. How afraid people still are of that as a thing. It's interesting, J.R., because that was a question I had lined up to ask you exactly that. Just, I mean, how is it that we have so, we are sort of scaffolded by so many assumptions about who deserves the stage, what it takes for people to believe in you, how you can be a complete, full of mendacity and have people believe that you're speaking the truth. And as you know, as you say, Hillary Clinton has now kind of disappeared and is now reemerging, writing, I believe, some kind of crime novels. So he seems to have given up on the idea that power can be believed in. And so now she's going to, for her, now she's going to be in the world of make believe. Yeah. And I saw the follow up to that, which is in the chat that Lea wife is not something to aspire to, which is interesting because she's not, she's profoundly unlikeable in many, many ways. We understand her. I've made it so that it's very clear why she is the way she is. She has had an incredible pressure from the world around her that has shaped her into kind of a monstrous mother, a difficult wife, all of this other stuff. But I also believe it's very important in fiction and elsewhere for there to be space for women to be profoundly unlikeable, particularly ones who want power and want to command the stage because we give that permission to male characters so easily. We give them that space. We're willing to go along with it, even if they are terrible, which they often are, because terrible people can still be entertaining and you can still empathize with them. There are still stories to be told. In fact, sometimes terrible people have the best stories. The entirety of Lear is built around the terrible person making a terrible story. But that permission is not often given still to female characters. It was very important for me to give Lear wife that sort of density, that layering of many motives, some of them not particularly friendly. Joseph Heisler has an interesting question that kind of harkens back to the voice you used. He asks, how do you decide what voice to write when referencing a famous play? Did you find yourself taking on Shakespeare's voice at any time or were you ever tempted to echo his voice? Even trying to echo Shakespeare is terrifying. The idea is just, and in many ways, doing this as a first novel is an active, blind ego that I probably wouldn't try five novels in. You have to kind of be at your first novel stage to be like, of course, this is fine. I'll treat it quite a bit of Shakespeare. It's fine. But I had to be quite careful to make it, as I said, not seem like a pastiche of Shakespeare, you know, not make it feel like I was writing another play. Because the other thing is that plays, as Philip will note, plays are incredibly different storytelling vehicles to novels. The way that language is presented and language is used to build character is really, really different. And so a lot of what Shakespeare does technically is not kind of applicable to what I could be doing. And I did have an interesting conversation with my publisher early on who was like, were you ever tempted to do, you know, thou dost and, you know, stay in the register really clearly. And I was like, no, because I'm fairly sure people would think it was funny. They would read it and go absolutely not and shut the book and move away. And you can get away with it if you're Shakespeare, because you're Shakespeare. But with something like this, I had to be really careful, basically, is the answer to that question. Well, I have a question that I don't see any further ones in the chat, but just while we're giving someone else a chance to type in one, I was going to ask to you if the tricky thing often about writing about women in past centuries is dealing is writing within the context of, as you know, you've done it very well, writing in the context of how women were guarded and how women were treated in those in that time. And there might be a temptation for a sort of escapism. Well, I'll make this. Yes. I'll make this woman more powerful than she likely would have been or I'll make her more likeable. I'll make her more palatable to a 21st century audience. Did you ever get any pushback on that when you were editing it? I had some concern that Abbey's were not as freeing as or not freeing, but you know, that they weren't what I kind of made them out to be. But actually, Abbas's were, if anything, more powerful in the specific period that I was that I was talking about. I did a lot of research and because of the nature of Oxford, I found someone who specializes in medieval abbeys. And she basically informed me that Abbas's were huge landowners. They were incredibly powerful figures in the community. It was one of the really guaranteed ways for women to obtain quite serious political power in Europe in the medieval period. And if anything, I sort of underplay that because I'm not sure people would have believed it in its own way. And I've also underplayed how much freedom there was in Abbey's for very wealthy women. Because if you read accounts of the times, they were allowed to have sweets. They had pet monkeys. They could wear silk under their robes. They could have, you know, ornate jewels all over themselves. And I've put in the class divide very clearly between the nuns because it's a feature of the novel. But there were some excesses that were just accepted at the time that modern readers would be like, wait, what? What? They've got a Pomeranian. What? Yeah. So that was sort of the tension is making it believable for modern readers. Um, there's another question from Maxine. I wonder if you've read Hamnet, which has a totally different approach to Agnes, the Anne Hathaway character. I have it came out as Leo wife was in editing and has been this amazing, beautiful success, which I'm so glad about because that is a beautiful book. And a really interesting take on, yeah, what it was like to be a woman in that particular and very clearly in Shakespeare's time itself, whereas I've set Leo wife in earlier centuries. And I have nothing but good things to say about that book. I am also, I really, really liked the cover. The cover came out and we were having cover conversations. I was like, could we make it look like this? And they were like, no, people will get confused. But no, it's a very, very interesting book that does a lot of, I think really intriguing stuff with echoing Hamlet and Hamlet and the ideas of what Shakespeare took from his life. And actually we interviewed Maggie O'Farrell here at the Mechanics Institute when the book first came out. Yeah, so it's so lovely to have you sort of, you know, thinking about that novel as well. It was beautiful. It was a lot of stuff, a lot of kind of retellings and like silence of the girls and things like that came out just before Leo wife came out. It was lovely. It felt like we were sort of riding a wave of interest in women's voices that haven't been heard, you know. It's sort of, even though we, it wasn't possible to kind of read each other's work as it was happening, it's just sort of a coincidence. It's really lovely and I hope it keeps happening. I hope these books keep being made. The only thing that Grendel's mother from Beowulf is right for a retelling. If anyone wants, that's free, have at it. Pam, how are we off for time? I'm just looking, it's 101 so it means that it's 901 in County Cork. Oh, let's see. There's a question from Rabbi Avi Winnaker. Can we just run to that quickly, Pam? Sorry, let me scroll back and find that question. Yeah. Do you want me to read it out? Yes, go ahead if you would. Yeah, so Rabbi Avi Winnaker says, slightly off, but is there a relationship between Cordelia and Desdemona, Lea and Othello? If you don't have a take on that, that comes to mind, J.I., which I'm sure you do, I can jump in on that one. You go first. I have some thoughts, but I think your take on this is going to be really interesting. Well, I think power and the loss of it and the fact that the loss of power in terms of one's identity. You know, I always think of, I'll just say, because Avi is a Rabbi, I'll say, just referring this to the Christian idea of original sin, the idea of the rupture that is at the heart of Christian faith, I think is such a gorgeous metaphor for the rupture at the center of everybody. So the idea that we have internal integrity is, I think, is a sort of a myth. And so the idea that we have a rupture imposed by somebody else, by these original sinners, I think is a lovely way of just actually seeing that and the search to heal that rupture at every point. I think that is such a beautiful premise for the study of any character, anywhere, particularly Lea. He doesn't discover his rupture until he's almost dead. And Othello is at the height of his power. He says, you know, the flinty and steel couch of war has been my thrice driven bed of down. And so when he gets off that bed of down and goes into the bedroom in the house, that's when everything falls apart. The rupture, all Iago has to do is poke his finger in there. And the rupture is just, you know, just blows out. So I think when you think of these characters, the female characters are in a sense, their mercury, their sense of OK, but they can blame it on the females rather than blame it on the rupture. That might sound a little bit complicated. In here it's clear. Well, that's that was basically my take on it as well, which is that you can see the parallels of their expectations of power in their world and the command that they have over themselves in their domestic life are upended in some way. Someone negates it. Someone decides that they're not going to play the game anymore or they're going to play a game of their own. And that's what causes the destabilization to start things to start unraveling and to go horribly wrong in both in both senses. But yes, ultimately caused by what's rooted in both the male characters that faults that they have set in motion years before. And that's sort of the interesting parallel there. I know poor thing. Hey, by the way, everybody, I'll just put in the cal shakes address again in case anybody wants to do in depth. And I'm hoping that I'm going to bludgeon JR to join me in one of those one of those sessions. Oh, yes, absolutely. And that Cal shakes. And Pam, and, and, and Laura, did you want to, or Maxine, did you want to close off with anything or just thank both of you for a fantastic conversation. And this is just, it's, it's wonderful to have the voices of women, known and unknown given agency. And we should continue that for the future and all of our both in literature and in our society and in politics as we go forward. I want to thank these two incredible Aussies. These two are you type ladies of literature. We have author J R Thorpe and dramaturg, Philippa Kelly from California Shakespeare Theater in Orinda, joining us today and I am so pleased to have this very voluminous audience today. So I want to encourage you to come back to our programs to buy the book, Lear Wife to sign up for Phillipa's in depth conversations, which are magnificent. And join us in the theater live at Cal shakes this fall and this summer I think you're doing Romeo and Juliet this summer. So, these are incredible contemporaries, temporary versions of Shakespeare, and we look forward to seeing you at Mechanics Institute in the theater, and also in the library. So, thank you all. And thank you, JR and all best. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me I've had a wonderful time. What are we?