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Elizabeth the First Wife
by Lian Dolan
Paperback : 304 pages
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Elizabeth Lancaster, an English professor at Pasadena City College, finds her perfectly dull but perfectly orchestrated life upended one summer by three men: her movie-star ex-husband, a charming political operative, and William Shakespeare. Until now, she’d been content living in the ...
Introduction
Elizabeth Lancaster, an English professor at Pasadena City College, finds her perfectly dull but perfectly orchestrated life upended one summer by three men: her movie-star ex-husband, a charming political operative, and William Shakespeare. Until now, she’d been content living in the shadow of her high-profile and highly accomplished family. Then her college boyfriend and one-time husband of seventeen months, A-list action star FX Fahey, shows up with a job offer that she can’t resist, and Elizabeth’s life suddenly gets a whole lot more interesting. She’s off to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for the summer to make sure FX doesn’t humiliate himself in an avant-garde production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
As she did so skillfully with her first novel, Helen of Pasadena, which spent more than a year on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list, Lian Dolan spins a lively, smart, and very funny tale of a woman reinventing her life in unexpected ways.
Lian Dolan is also the co-author of The Satellite Sisters' Uncommon Senses. As part of the Satellite Sisters, Lian and her four sisters found national acclaim first on NPR, then on ABC Radio and XM Satellite Radio. She also creates the popular podcast and blog Chaos Chronicles.
Excerpt
Chapter 1“So, is this a relationship built on manipulation or intellectual attraction?”
Please God, someone have an answer. Anybody. Nobody. I looked out at my class of twenty-four students, only about sixteen of whom were feigning interest in the material. Not a single hand was raised, not even Lydia’s, which was a bad sign. Lydia was my prize student in Shakespeare 401, my upper-level English class at Pasadena City College. A bright young Korean second-gen with UC Berkeley dreams, she was my go-to responder on days when even I didn’t feel like discussing the Bard. Lydia would pull some question out of thin air and keep the discussion going until the bell rang or Antonio’s cell phone went off (Party Rockers in the House Tonight!), whichever came first. ... view entire excerpt...
Discussion Questions
When we first meet Elizabeth, she seems perfectly contented with her lifestyle, though her family of high achievers encourage her to be more ambitious. Do you think she was denying her ambitions out of fear?Setting plays a large role in Elizabeth the First Wife. Do you think that Ashland and Pasadena could be considered characters of their own in the book? Does Elizabeth’s relationship with each of these places changes over the course of the book?
The title Elizabeth the First Wife ties the character of Elizabeth immediately to Elizabeth the First of England. What aspects of our protagonist draw inspiration from the first Elizabeth? How is she a modern day Elizabeth?
When Elizabeth’s ex-husband swoops into town with a suspiciously generous job offer, she enlists both of her sisters for advice on what to do. If you were her sister, would you have advised her to go?
Notes From the Author to the Bookclub
Q & A with Author Lian Dolan In Helen of Pasadena, your protagonist was a woman roughly your age, with a teenage son about the age of one of your sons. She even majored in the same thing in college that you did. But Elizabeth Lancaster is younger, single, childless, and a Shakespeare professor. Was it more of a challenge to write her? Actually, it was more a lot more fun to write Elizabeth than Helen. With Helen, there were so many obvious parallels to my life that I really had to work to make it clear she wasn’t me. (I thought I’d done a fine job, but I can’t tell you how many people have called me “Helen” since the book has come out. Or introduced me by saying, “This is Helen of Pasadena!” Um, no.) Elizabeth’s the cool, slightly cynical single gal that I’d like to think I would have been had I not gotten married and if I had a PhD. I had a fantastic Shakespeare professor in college who literally brought the material to life with her passion and sometimes brought us to tears with her lectures. Elizabeth is an homage to her, but she comes with more emotional baggage and a funkier wardrobe than my former professor. One similarity you have to Elizabeth is being the youngest of the family—in her case, a highly accomplished family, and in your case, a very large family, also with its share of accomplishments. How has being a youngest shaped you as a writer? When you’re the youngest in a big family—or probably any family—you end up observing more than contributing for years of your life. No one wants to talk to the youngest or hear what you have to say at the dinner table. So I spent a lot of years listening, laughing, and making copious mental notes about people, behavior, and conversations—all very helpful for a writer. Also, you have plenty of “lives” to borrow material from. Was that funny story about the bad date mine? Or my big sister’s? Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter who went on the bad date, I can still use it in my writing. Shakespeare looms large in Elizabeth the First Wife. Have you always been interested in the Bard? I grew up in Connecticut near a town called Stratford, which is home to an “official” Shakespearean theater, so from elementary school through high school, seeing a play was an annual field trip. And I can still remember the discussion about The Taming of the Shrew in my eighth-grade English class with my groovy, feminist teacher. I think that early exposure gave me an interest and a comfort level with the material. Let’s face it, the first few Shakespeare plays you see, you barely have a clue what’s happening. But the more you read and watch, the more you understand. In high school, I also loved going into New York City in the summer to see Shakespeare in the Park with friends, because that was a whole happening, from waiting in line for the tickets to seeing great actors in an outdoor setting with a raucous audience. By college, I eagerly signed up for a full-year class, reading a dozen plays and even playing Hamlet in our in-class production. But my lifelong fascination with the Bard was really cemented during my junior year abroad in Athens. I had the opportunity to see an amazing Royal Shakespeare Company/Peter Hall production of Coriolanus with Ian McKellen in the title role. The production was staged in the ancient amphitheater on the Acropolis. There was no need for a set, because it was the ancient amphitheater on the Acropolis! Just the words, the acting, and the lighting—and with Shakespeare, you don’t need any more. It was mind-blowing, to steal a phrase from the book. Just one of those experiences that connected me to thousands of years of theater, words, and the whole human experience in a single night. Made me a lifelong believer in the power of the Bard. How challenging was it to write about Shakespeare, the most influential literary figure of all time? Very. The more I researched for the book, the more I realized I didn’t know jack about Shakespeare. At first, I thought I’d weave some Shakespearean mystery into the plot, something to do with the writing of Midsummer and the noble family for whom it was written. But after dipping into my research, it became very clear that there were lots and lots of serious Shakespeare scholars and ten times more enthusiasts who would bust me if I didn’t get the research exactly right. That reality was sobering! That’s why I decided that Elizabeth’s research for her book would have a pop-culture slant and be more accessible and fun than arcane. That was a critical decision in the creation of Elizabeth’s character and the plot. As a writer, I felt inspired when I decided to go in that direction. Which brings up Elizabeth’s book-within-a-book, All’s Fair. What inspired that? Once I decided to ditch a super-serious scholarly focus on the Shakespearean material, I worked on creating pseudo-scholarly material that any reader could enjoy. The idea hit me in the shower—where I do my best thinking—and I immediately got out and searched for contemporary relationship books based on Shakespeare. There weren’t any! I was shocked, but thrilled. It seemed like a really contemporary way to use the material, and I like writing about contemporary women and their lives. Plus, let’s face it, even for educated readers, for many of us our last exposure to a Shakespeare play was in high school or college. Details get fuzzy. And who’s kidding who? Life is busy, and nobody sits down to read The Tempest after they put the kids to bed. But I thought, readers might have read The Tempest at some point and would like a little refresher class. I hope All’s Fair, the book-within-a-book, helps readers feel a little more on top of their Shakespeare again. Like they’re back in the literary game, able to drop references and quote quotes without having to work too hard! Is there a Shakespearean heroine you most identify with? Before I wrote the book, I probably would have said Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing, just because she is fabulous and easy to like. The Elizabeth Bennet of the canon. But doing the research on all the Righteous Role Models made me appreciate so many more of the female characters for various reasons. Juliet was one tough teenager. Cleopatra worked it. Portia made a feminist statement in an age when those didn’t come easily. There’s a lot to admire in almost all the women of Shakespeare, especially when viewed through the perspective of time. In this era of extremely heated political debate, you’ve created a world in which Democrats and Republicans not only get along, but also love each other. Is this literary wishful thinking or actually possible? When I conceived of the book, we had a Republican governor of California who was a fiscal conservative, a social liberal, and a bodybuilding movie star married to a Kennedy clan member! Clearly, here in California, anything IS possible. Elizabeth Lancaster sticks to her career guns and doesn’t do what her mother wants her to do. Is this an essential message for you? One of the themes I wanted to explore in Elizabeth the First Wife was the idea of breaking free of your family’s expectations and being your own person. (That’s definitely the baby of the family in me!) But I’ve observed in my own life and the lives of others that being your own person is not that easy, even as you slide into midlife. And ironically, it can be even harder to carve out an adult identity if you have a close family where you can get stuck, never really evolving from the role you played when you were twelve. In Elizabeth Lancaster, I wanted to explore a woman sticking up to not only her mother, but really her whole family, who have plenty of ideas of how she should be living, what she should be doing, how she should be dressing. The Lancasters are purposefully an intimidating bunch, high profile and high powered, making it even tougher for Elizabeth to strike out on a new path. Plus, she is stuck romantically at age twenty-three, when she got totally burned, so that’s not helping her forward momentum. The book focuses on Elizabeth, in her mid-thirties, defining who she is and finally making choices as she sees fit, not to please her family. And I do feel that finding a professional path is critical for women to establish their adult identities. We have a lot of roles we play in society or in a family—wife, mother, sister, aunt, caretaker— and by definition those roles rely on others in our family. But in our professional lives, we get to create our own persona. Be who we really are when our mother isn’t watching. I think that’s important in a woman’s self-identity. Once again, Pasadena serves as a major setting and theme. Has your vision of Pasadena evolved since writing Helen of Pasadena? Can we expect to see you escaping to Ashland any time soon? I know so much more now about Pasadena than I did when I wrote Helen of Pasadena. Wow, since that book came out, lifelong Pasadenans have dished the dirt on all kinds of scandals and local lore. I won’t be walking away from Pasadena anytime soon, because there’s too much good stuff to mine and great cultural institutions to explore. But I did like bringing in another locale. It keeps my writing fresh and provides a comparative setting for Pasadena, which is steeped in tradition. The next book will be Pasadena and somewhere in Europe, because I can write the trip off as research, right? That being said, Ashland is an amazing town with a wonderful spirit and a creative soul. I’d love to find my own little Sage Cottage there one day. Helen Fairchild swoons over the manly forearms on the sexy archaeologist. Elizabeth Lancaster swoons over the manly forearms on the sexy political operative. Is it safe to say you have a thing for masculine forearms? Guilty as charged. Forearms are revealing. I think as a gender, women have focused on men’s backsides and abs for too long. Six-packs don’t tell us anything except that the guy spends a lot of time in the gym and probably doesn’t eat pasta. A man’s forearms say a lot about his life choices. Are they tanned and muscular? Then the guy must get outside and move dirt around, figuratively or literally. Are they pale and slim? Too much time in the office! Could be dull. There’s a story in every forearm, and all you need is for the guy to roll up his sleeve to get a good look. Does writing a novel get any easier the second time around? Nope.Book Club Recommendations
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