Katherine Keenum

Website tip: Writers of historical fiction sometimes have to fudge past usages and customs to make them comprehensible to modern readers (Jeanette would no doubt always have called Amy Miss Richardson, but I decided to put them on first-name basis to communicate the level of their friendship). Nevertheless, we need to know what to fudge. To learn about the evolution of Mrs. and Miss from Mistress and what it all implies, click here. Read More 

In discussing a story line in a juvenile-fiction assignment with a ghostwriter, Mattie suggests including cakes made from puffed rice. Never mind about the ghostwriter’s story or my plot twist. The burning question was, Had puffed rice been invented in 1908? Luckily for me, the answer is yes! It was introduced by Alexander P. Anderson at the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. Read More 

My new heroine Mattie works for a literary firm that produces juvenile series fiction. I wanted her to be aware of other, better books for children. E. Nesbit seemed perfect: imaginative, popular but literate, unstuffy. What work of hers might Mattie be familiar with in 1908? The House of Arden was published that year in England. What about America?

The expert on the question is Professor James Arthur Bond of California Lutheran University. I e-mailed him out of the blue, and he was generous enough to answer immediately with the information that Ardenwas serialized in The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly, which was published in London but distributed in the U.S. as well as Britain. Perfect!  Read More 

The flower markets and sellers of Paris pop up now and again in Where the Light Falls; but what really makes me want to include a post about one today is my recent discovery of a beautifully illustrated blog that features clips of the sounds if Paris. In a story  Read More 

Okay, a thirteenth-century artist's notebook has nothing to do with either Where the Light Falls or ANONYMITY, but it certainly brings together my training as a medievalist and my current interest in artists' methods of composition. It happened that this morning, after reading James Gurney's post on his own recent Imagine FX article on composition, I pursued a reference to Villard in a book about books and landed to my delight on the Bibliothèque Nationale's digitization of the entire album (BnF MS Fr 19093)—page after page of jottings, mnemonics, pattern drawings, etc. If you read French, you can click on any leaf and call up a discussion of that page. For the BnF's 1906 printed edition, click here.

As for me, I'd better get back to writing ficiton. Read More 

Flat roofs on buildings have been used as living space ever since the first towns in the Mediterranean world. New York at the turn of the 20th C was no different. Tenants in the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side went to the roofs to cool off. Elaborate roof gardens graced hotels, theaters,  Read More 

The effects of rebuilding in Paris were very much in evidence when Jeanette arrived there in 1878. Even more visible were the effects of New York's growth in 1908. Read More 

By the time her train reaches Paris, Jeanette is feeling scared, and this moody photograph helped me think about what was outside the window as the day darkened. Baron Haussmann’s remaking of Paris not only changed the physical look of the city, but also distorted  Read More 

Blog tip: Another artist of domestic interiors—Carl Vilhelm Holsoe.

The main thing I wanted to readers to feel with Jeanette and Effie when they landed in Dieppe was how foreign France looked and felt to them and how exciting. It also mattered to me to get the geography right. The tall houses facing the quay helped on both scores.  Read More