For the last decade I've fallen down the deepest rabbit hole an author can stumble into: historical fiction that attempts to be accurate, about real historical people--the "grand narrative," as Hilary Mantel calls it. I kept the project secret for several years, fearing that someone would write this breathtaking story before I could finish my research. I shouldn't have worried. That lost decade, where I seemed to disappear from my profession, is the reason almost no one attempts this form of fiction. I should have listened earlier to Mantel's first Reith Lecture, where I would have heard her say, "Among authors of literary fiction, no one was fighting me for this territory."
My novel is about the young life of Cosimo I de' Medici, who was unexpectedly elected Duke of Florence in 1537 at the age of seventeen, when his distant cousin was assassinated by another cousin. He was not in the line of succession, had not been raised at court, and the elder statesmen assumed he would be their puppet. It turned out instead that he had sharp political acumen: he gradually nudged his advisors out, thwarted overthrows from exiles, kept Florence independent of the Holy Roman Emperor and the pope, shored up the finances of the city-state, created the first bureaucracy, and eventually unified Tuscany, all while building a grand ducal dynasty with his wife that would last for two hundred years. Historians scratch their heads: where did he get these leadership qualities? Who made him? The secret lies in the people who loved him: his lioness of a mother, determined to fashion an honorable man who was unlike her husband; his tutor, a weak teacher of Latin and Greek and penmanship, but stronger in experiential learning; his first lover, lost to history after she delivered his child; his wife, to whom he was devoted, and who understood the pomp of a court; and his illegitimate daughter, the utterly delightful beginning of a large family.
The manuscript is nearly finished. It's a bit of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, a bit of Maggie O'Farrell's The Marriage Portrait, a bit of Jo Harkin's The Pretender, and a hint of Game of Thrones. I hope someone out there likes it.
My novel is about the young life of Cosimo I de' Medici, who was unexpectedly elected Duke of Florence in 1537 at the age of seventeen, when his distant cousin was assassinated by another cousin. He was not in the line of succession, had not been raised at court, and the elder statesmen assumed he would be their puppet. It turned out instead that he had sharp political acumen: he gradually nudged his advisors out, thwarted overthrows from exiles, kept Florence independent of the Holy Roman Emperor and the pope, shored up the finances of the city-state, created the first bureaucracy, and eventually unified Tuscany, all while building a grand ducal dynasty with his wife that would last for two hundred years. Historians scratch their heads: where did he get these leadership qualities? Who made him? The secret lies in the people who loved him: his lioness of a mother, determined to fashion an honorable man who was unlike her husband; his tutor, a weak teacher of Latin and Greek and penmanship, but stronger in experiential learning; his first lover, lost to history after she delivered his child; his wife, to whom he was devoted, and who understood the pomp of a court; and his illegitimate daughter, the utterly delightful beginning of a large family.
The manuscript is nearly finished. It's a bit of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, a bit of Maggie O'Farrell's The Marriage Portrait, a bit of Jo Harkin's The Pretender, and a hint of Game of Thrones. I hope someone out there likes it.
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