Back then, when I had that original idea to write about the seventeenth century, the whole thing was set in 1666. I was thinking of Margaret near the…

- Danielle Dutton

I had all these sparkles I'd collected and wanted to work in, but when I originally started writing it and it was originally this novel about all the…

- Danielle Dutton

Margaret Cavendish was one of the people who came up in the course. That was when I started thinking about her as a character for a book, but my idea…

- Danielle Dutton

So it was this multi-perspective, multi-character book, and it went through all of these different manifestations. I'm not sure there was a single mo…

- Danielle Dutton

The reason the middle section switches to third person is, well, this is middle age. This is the part in her life where she loses track of something …

- Danielle Dutton

It's all just so fraught when you're writing and then going through the editorial process. It feels like this shape-shifting thing. When it's done, a…

- Danielle Dutton

I sense people expect something to show for ten years. But I do feel like it is dense. Some of my own favorite books are slim, but there's a lot of w…

- Danielle Dutton

I was trying to focus on Margaret's trajectory as an artist, as a woman and an artist. Hopefully Cavendish experts won't be angry at me for anything …

- Danielle Dutton

There was a stage inside it and a crank on the outside that would rotate something, like a tiny tree carved of cork, onto the stage, and then the tho…

- Danielle Dutton