Katherine Mezzacappa talks all things bookish for the companion series to our popular podcast, Burning Books
“In The Maiden of Florence, Katherine Mezzacappa crafts a sensuous and raw story about beauty, sex, sacrifice, and a mother’s undying love, a moving delineation of what it means to be a humble pawn of powerful men finding dignity amid the chessboard of Renaissance Italy.“
— Gina Buonaguro, author of The Virgins of Venice.
A book from your early days?
Ruth Duffin’s Handy Andy and the Wee House, published in Dublin in 1957 (no, I am not that old. Not quite). The two children construct a little house by good deeds and kindness. When they quarrel, the house starts to fall apart.
Dog ears or book marks?
Book marks. I hate mistreating books.
A quote you can say by heart?
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
That’s the opening line of LP Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953) and it’s a guiding principle for me as I write almost exclusively historical fiction. My characters can’t be contemporary people wearing funny clothes. Through history, individuals have had to operate within the social norms of their epoch. The challenge to a social norm is often where I find my plot.
Do you lend without expecting a book returned?
I seldom lend because I’m so bad at asking for the book back!
Best book someone gave you?
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard. It’s his only novel, but how could he have followed a book like that?
A book you return to over the years?
Far from the Madding Crowd. My first Hardy and still my favourite.
A book that taught you something important?
Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. Be very wary of people who know they’re right, especially if they think it on moral grounds.
A book that makes you laugh?
That would have to be At Swim-Two-Birds. The Pooka MacPhellimy is a great comic invention. For something more recent, David Stafford’s Skelton’s Guide to Domestic Poisons. You mightn’t think that a book set in late 1920s Birmingham and featuring an outfit called the ‘Joy of Jesus Mission’ would be hilarious, but it is.
A book you associate with a particular life event?
My grandmother died when I was 13 and I was distraught. At the time I was reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles (yes, I was that kind of child) and somehow the ghastly injustice of them hanging Tess got mixed up in that grief. It was as real.
A book you are writing now?
I’ve just finished the first draft of the fictionalised life of Lucie Dumas, who was the mistress of Samuel Butler. He visited her once a week and paid her a pound. It was some years into their relationship before he told her his real name. At some point he introduced her to his friend and later biographer, who then visited on another afternoon, his pound being paid by Butler. This is a woman who lived in the shadows of Victorian London, as a ‘demi-mondaine.’ I have tried to give a voice to her twilight existence.
A book you’d leave to burn?
Probably Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I read all of Lawrence as a teenager but it was only later that I realised that he knew very little about female sexuality. Plus he was a wife-beater and a eugenicist. I couldn’t leave my copy to burn, though, as I have already given it away to Oxfam.
What would you save that’s not a book?
My cat. I’d save her before any book.
