Biography—Kate Quinn
Quinn was born and raised in Long Beach, California, graduated from Boston University with a BA (2004) and a master's degree (2006) in classical voice.
Her novels often focus on women's unexpected roles in history such as military snipers, spies, and code breakers. Her works have been set in several historical eras, including five novels that take place during the Roman Empire, two books about the Borgias in the Italian Renaissance, and most recently a series of novels set in the 1940s and 1950s, centering on the events during and after the Second World War.
She has also contributed to a series of historical novels collaboratively written with 5-6 other authors; each author wrote a separate chapter presenting a different character's voice, which together make up a single overlapping story.
Kate Quinn—publications
The Empress of Rome Series
Mistress of Rome (2010)
Daughters of Rome (2011)
Empress of the Seven Hills (2012)
The Three Fates (2015)
Lady of the Eternal City (2015)
The Borgia Chronicles
The Serpent and the Pearl (2013)
The Lion and the Rose (2014)
Other novels
The Alice Network (2017)
The Huntress (2019)
The Rose Code (2021)
The Diamond Eye (2022)
The Phoenix Crown (2024) (with Janie Chang)
The Briar Club (2024)
Kate Quinn—publications
Collaboratively written novels
A Day of Fire: A Novel of Pompeii (with Stephanie Dray, Sophie Perinot, Ben Kane and Vicky Alvear Shecter) (2014)
A Year of Ravens: A Novel of Boudica's Rebellion (with Ruth Downie, Stephanie Dray, E Knight, Vicky Alvear Shecter, S. J. A. Turney and Russell Whitfield) (2015)
A Song of War: A Novel of Troy (with Christian Cameron, Libbie Hawker, Vicky Alvear Shecter, S. J. A. Turney, Stephanie Thornton and Russell Whitfield) (2016)
Ribbons of Scarlet: A Novel of the French Revolution's Women (with Stephanie Dray, Laura Kamoie, E Knight, Heather Webb and Sophie Perinot)(2019)
Biography—Janie Chang (Short and Bland Version)
Janie Chang is a bestselling author of historical fiction. Many of her novels incorporate stories drawn from family history and often include elements of fantasy. She grew up listening to stories about life in a small Chinese town in the years before the Second World War and tales of ancestors who encountered dragons, ghosts, and immortals.
Born in Taiwan, Janie has lived in the Philippines, Iran, Thailand, and New Zealand. She now lives on the beautiful Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, Canada with her husband and Minnie, a rescue cat who thinks the staff could do better.
She is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University. She was the founder and main organizer of Authors for Indies, a 100% volunteer-staffed event that promoted a national day of support by Canadian authors for Canada's independent bookstores; the event transitioned to Canadian Independent Bookstore Day.
Biography—Janie Chang
Her first novel, Three Souls, was a finalist for the 2014 BC Book Prizes Fiction Prize;
her second novel, Dragon Springs Road, was a Globe and Mail national bestseller. Both were nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award.
The Library Of Legends was a Book of the Month Club pick, nominated for the Evergreen Award, and a Globe and Mail national bestseller.
The Porcelain Moon was released in February 21, 2023 and was a Globe and Mail historical fiction bestseller.
Her latest novel, The Phoenix Crown, co-authored with Kate Quinn, was a Globe and Mail #1 Instant Bestseller and a USA Today bestseller.
Biography—Janie Chang (less official version)
Regrets
`If I’d known historical novels would be my chosen genre, I would’ve paid more attention to Chinese history at a younger age. And I wouldn't have fought so hard against learning to read and write Chinese, but when you're a teenager that would've been like admitting your parents were right.
The Travel Bug.
My father's career took us to wonderful and interesting countries and eventually we immigrated to Canada. I love to travel and see new places. So when a job came up that gave me the opportunity to live and work in New Zealand, I jumped. But after three years in NZ, even with trips to Australia and Fiji, I got homesick. And came home to Vancouver, Canada.
Biography—Janie Chang
Inspiration
My father was a wonderful storyteller and our family history has been the best and most unique legacy he ever could've left me. I grew up listening to stories about his childhood in the town of Pinghu in the years before the Second World War.
My favorite stories were about our ancestors: the ancestor who saw a ghost, the ancestor who met immortals, the ancestor who saw a dragon, the story of the ghost lanterns and many more.
But I always knew my first novel would be centered around the story of my grandmother – and when I finally got around to writing, that’s exactly what inspired Three Souls. Both Three Souls, Dragon Springs Road, and The Library of Legends all incorporate anecdotes from family history, so inevitably supernatural elements nose their ay into the novels.
Biography—Janie Chang
Getting Here
It took a while to make the commitment to writing a novel. For one thing, when I was 17, my eldest brother gave me a very helpful lecture. It was called A Husband is Not a Financial Plan. The key message was that a woman should always have a career so that she can leave her husband if he turns out to be a jerk.
So I got a degree in Computer Science and had a wonderful and satisfying career in the technology sector. But even there I defected from the technical to the more creative side of the business, starting out in systems engineering and finishing up in Marketing. I have a wide streak of geek, but after decades of putting off my writing ambitions it was time to Do Something.
I applied for The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University in 2011 with the goal of writing my first novel during that one-year program. You can stop laughing now. It was the best thing I ever did and truly life-changing. In 2013, HarperCollins Canada published Three Souls and I've just kept on writing.
Biography—Janie Chang
Advice, Whether or Not You Want It
If you have a burning, and I mean positively incendiary, desire to write a book that gets published, don’t just talk about it. Write, even if it looks like crap at first. Commit the time. Then take some writing classes to shortcut the learning process because you need to learn about story arc, pacing, character development, and countless other elements of the craft. Set realistic expectations by learning about the business of writing. Do your homework – the Internet is full of useful resources. If your biggest fear is seeing yourself in a rocking chair at age 95 saying “I wish I’d done more to write that book,” do something before it becomes soul-destroying. Write. How to get started? There's tons of information on the Internet, but here's a blog I wrote called Resources for Writers.
Collect family history. If your parents, grandparents, or older relatives are still around, ask them about their lives. Oral history is so ephemeral. Someone dies and that knowledge is lost. Someone loses their memory and that knowledge is lost. You may not care about it right now but when you’re older, believe me, it will matter. We all want to understand where we came from and how that's affected us. When we’re mature enough to stop being self-centered (speaking for myself), we wish we had known our parents better. You can try recording their stories – that’s what I asked my father to do. As a child I had listened to so many family stories but what about future generations who will never meet those sources of family history?
On collaboration
Author's note:
we attribute our successful collaboration to three things: Google Docs, a compatible work ethic, and the unshakable belief that a spreadsheet will solve everything! Not to mention a passion for the history we write about . . .
On collaboration (from Historical Novel Society)
“We met in 2017 after the Historical Novel Society conference, where our publisher sent us from Portland to Canada on a three-author, three-city tour with our mutual friend Jennifer Robson,” the authors said via email. “Everything that could possibly go wrong on a book tour went wrong, and the whole fiasco quickly morphed from the Historical Fiction Tour to the Hysterical Fiction Tour. We could have ended that week scratching each other’s eyes out, but instead we ended up the best of friends! So, when the idea of a novel about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake reared its head, we thought, ‘If we could survive the Hysterical Fiction Tour and still be friends at the end of it, the odds that we can write a book together without bloodshed are pretty good.’
Creating characters was their first task. “This book really began with a plotline as simple as ‘Let’s each create a heroine we like and then throw them together, add an earthquake, and stir,’” the authors said. “Kate knew she wanted to write an opera singer, since she has a background in opera training and because there was a famous performance of Carmen the night before the earthquake, which made a perfect backdrop for a musical heroine. Janie knew she wanted to create a Chinatown heroine who is part of the first generation of Chinese-American women in California, and thus has a foot in each world. We formed our two women first—Gemma the opera singer, Suling the Chinatown seamstress—then let the plot evolve from their characters.”
On collaboration (from Historical Novel Society)
A favorite research stop of both authors was the California Academy of Sciences where one of their secondary characters, the real-life curator of botany Alice Eastwood, worked at the time of the earthquake. “The librarians there were thrilled that we were there to learn about Alice and could not have been more helpful,” the authors said. “We were thrilled to be reading—and touching—the ephemera of her life. We are such Alice fans!”
Eastwood appeared early in the authors’ research and became an important inspiration to the book’s younger female protagonists “who are striving for agency in a man’s world.”
This theme of sexism developed naturally, as did racism. “Given that the story takes place during the years of the Chinese Exclusion Act, we always knew that racism would be one of the challenges facing our heroine Suling,” the authors said.
On collaboration (from Historical Novel Society)
Since they’d be working remotely and independently—Quinn from San Diego and Chang from British Columbia—they first ensured that they had their plot firmly in place. “Before drafting a single word we wrote an overview of each chapter, which went into a spreadsheet,” the authors said. “Since we both knew how each chapter began and ended, that made it possible for us to dovetail the action. We decided that Kate would write from Gemma’s POV and Janie would write from Suling’s POV, and that we would write alternating chapters.”
What they didn’t plan or expect was the way their writing styles would blend so seamlessly into something new altogether. “Readers have commented that we obviously changed our writing styles in order to provide a seamless reading experience. That’s surprising because we did not strive to do that, not consciously anyway. We always figured that since we were writing from the POV of two very different women, that we could retain our individual styles and get away with it. But probably what happened is that in working closely together and reading each other’s prose every day, there was some osmosis and we ended up with a more unified style.”
On collaboration
Writing with a larger group as for A Day Of Fire or Ribbons Of Scarlet, you stick a little bit more to your own lane: the book is mapped out in advance, and you know exactly what section of the timeline you have to cover and where the scope of your story must begin and end so as to hook neatly with the parts that come before and after. There’s a lot of brainstorming to see where we can cameo each other’s characters in our own sections, but you’re still writing much more independently.
Co-authoring with Janie was much more collaborative right from the start; we planned alternating chapters from two very different heroines, but the entire story was very interwoven so there was much more give and take in the process. Spreadsheets were crucial!
On collaboration
Approach with care and respect, because I’ve heard of relationships getting ruined by co-authoring. Make sure to talk out in advance how you will work together: will you try to create a blended voice, or will you alternate writing chapters and keep your voices distinct? How will you edit each other? How do you like to be edited? Do you have the same goals for what the project is and how it will be accomplished? Do you have a similar work ethic? How will you handle conflicts if you disagree about something in the book? Talk out everything and be aware that group projects require sensitivity in being willing to listen to your co-author, and flexibility in being willing to bend.
On collaboration
Janie Chang: It was essentially a Chinese ghetto. This was during the years of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the U.S., so you had basically six huge blocks where 15,000 people were living and a great number of those were bachelor men since they were not allowed to bring their families or wives over.
It was a city that was being promoted by the white community as being filled with vice — including opium dens and brothels. But I wanted an opportunity to show that ordinary people live there: ordinary people were going about raising their families and taking their children for walks along the streets, ordinary people were just running businesses like grocery stores and laundries.
JC: It was pretty amazing, it was a deliberate architectural decision. The city's Chinatown's fathers actually hired a Western architect and he came through with his vision of what Americans thought China looked like. So his buildings with those swooping, curling up eaves and the decorations on the roofs and the fancy balconies and it became very successful.
Prior to that, Chinatown was just a bunch of San Francisco apartments along the street and people had made their homes there and put shops on the ground floor and this new exotic architecture drew tourists. And not only did it draw tourists during the regular year, it was there to promote some sense that it might be interesting to experience Chinese culture. This was such a successful formula in trying to combat racism that many other Chinatowns took up that same idea. This is why a lot of people think that Chinatown looks like this because this is what China actually looks like and [it's] not really.
Cast of characters—Gemma
Gemma Garland (Sally Gunderson): A talented soprano working in New York who suffers from migraines that prevent her from successfully managing her career. When her agent steals her money and she's thrown out of her boarding house, she leaves for San Francisco and old friend Reggie (Nellie), from their orphanage days. She has a pet budgie, Toscanini.
A Red Hook, Nebraska farm girl, her parents died when she was 14.
"terrified of being a hired girl with milkmaid calluses for the rest of her life, sleeping on a pallet in the cellar and getting the belt when she didn’t work fast enough."
Sally and Nellie decided "that we both need new names, because who’s going to take us seriously in this city with handles like Nellie Doyle and Sally Gunderson?” And they’d picked out new names on the spot—though to each other, even now so many years later, it was still Sally and Nell."
She and Reggie first shared a "squalid cold-water apartment where Nellie had been a tall bony brunette of sixteen."
Cast of characters—Gemma
Gemma decides to follow Nellie to San Francisco because, according to Nellie's first letter:
It’s a rollicking sort of place—San Francisco’s made its fortune, so now it’s mad to improve itself. Galleries, theaters, mansions . . . not to mention rich men lying around everywhere like lumps of gold, just waiting to be picked up!
When Gemma arrives at Reggie's apartment, she's gone. Although "letters had become their lifeline: a conversation carried on for nearly eight years," there's no message from Nellie.
After meeting Thornton, Gemma does receive a package at the Opera House, a sketch and a note typed on heavy, creamy white paper saying she's on a trip to Colorado. Gemma isn't initially suspicious, but later learns that the message came from Thornton, who has kidnapped Reggie because she saw him murder the Pinkerton detective who suspects him of the Park Avenue robbery and fire. He's committed Nellie to the St. Christina's Convent and Hospital.
Cast of characters—Gemma (Author's Note)
Gemma Garland:
[Kate: I trained as an opera singer in college—a high lyric soprano like Gemma—and my student loans are very grateful I could finally put my degrees to good use!
Gemma’s character and career are partially based on my wonderful college voice professor, Sally Arneson, a determined blue-eyed blonde who did indeed grow up on a Nebraska farm, make it big in Europe’s opera houses with her thrilling high F’s as Mozart’s Queen of the Night, and marry a wonderfully skilled pianist named George, who partnered her in countless concerts and recitals. I count them as friends to this day.]
George Serrano, pianist, whom Gemma marries after the earthquake and they move to Argentina.
Cast of characters—Reggie
Reggie (Nellie Doyle): Gemma's best friend and Suling's lover, a painter from New York City.
"Nellie went through gallery owners and art collectors on one side, curvaceous dancers and clay-smeared sculptresses on the other."
Thornton had been her patron before Gemma, until she saw him kill the Pinkerton detective. He then had her committed to St. Christina's Convent and Hospital as delusional, where she was imprisoned until the earthquake when Suling rescued her, and other patients.
She too was in the conservatory when Thornton tried to kill them. When they escaped, she and Suling went to Paris where Suling got employment at the Callot Soeurs fashion house.
Author's Note:
Reggie/Nellie is fictionalized, but female artists were making a name for themselves both in San Francisco and in Paris in the early 19th century. The Left Bank in particular thrived with expatriate women artists who lived for their art, flaunted romantic relationships with other women, and were socially accepted without a French eyelash ever being batted.
The mental institution to which Reggie was unfairly confined is fictionalized, but based on the very real State Insane Asylum near San Jose, which collapsed in the 1906 earthquake and released hundreds of inmates to roam free from their cells.
Cast of characters—Suling
Feng Suling: A skilled embroideress, American born, from Chinatown trying to escape an arranged marriage and her uncle's control.
When her parents died, she became the ward of her Third Uncle who wants to marry her off to Dr. Ouyang, for the dowry money to repay his gambling debts.
She considers Madame Ning, brothel owner, her friend/aunt. She has bad dreams:
the ones where Suling stood at the edge of a cliff high above the beach over Mile Rocks, mute and unable to run or shout for help. An endless repetition of an awful moment of that awful day when she had been paralyzed by the steep path down the cliff, the long drop to rocks and beach if she should slip. Unable to run, powerless to do anything but watch as the current swept her parents out into the Pacific. It had been eight months since her mother fell off the rocks while foraging for seaweed and her father waded out to rescue her. Caught by the riptide, both were pulled out to the open sea. Madam Ning had been her mother’s closest friend.
Cast of characters—Suling
Feng Suling:
At the beginning of the novel, she dresses as a boy, accompanied by Old Kow, to delivery laundry; she helps Gemma tote her luggage when she arrives in San Francisco.
Suling often accompanies the brothel women to Thornton's parties because she speaks English.
She rescues Reggie, and other women, when the earthquake strikes from St. Christina's Convent and Hospital where Thornton has placed her on the grounds that Reggie is delusional and unstable.
By the end of the novel, Suling and Reggie live in Paris where Suling has a job with Callot Soeurs as an embroideress. She has brought with her Thornton's dragon gown and wears it at the Poiret party; Thornton recognizes it.
Paul Poiret, fashion designer, starting to take the fashion world by storm; known for his hobble skirts, corsetless gowns, “oriental” designs, and his over-the-top entertaining. He wants to hire Suling away from Callot Soeurs.
Cast of characters—Suling (Author's Note)
Feng Suling:
Suling belongs to a demographic in transition: she doesn’t reject traditional values wholesale, but wonders how she can live at the periphery of those values while carving out a life completely unlike what her community might expect. At the turn of the twentieth century, there were limited career options for Chinese men and even fewer for women. Sewing and embroidery, which could be done at home as piecework, was a common cottage industry. It seemed only logical that Suling would have such skills, but after researching the art of Chinese embroidery, we just had to use it in the story. Thus, Suling’s expertise at creating intricate embroidery became the ticket to her career at a Paris fashion house.
Cast of characters—Alice Eastwood
Alice Eastwood: A noted botanist at the California Academy of Sciences. Author's Note:
Botanist Alice Eastwood had such a sensational life, she threatened to take over the entire book. She was an extraordinary self-taught scientist whose career roamed the globe, an intrepid explorer who set off on strenuous and dangerous hikes in pursuit of new plant samples, and a meticulous scholar who published hundreds of scientific articles.
At thirty-five she was named head of the Department of Botany at the California Academy of Sciences, a position she held until age ninety. When the 1906 earthquake hit and fires threatened to consume the Academy, Alice matter-of-factly hung her lunch bag on a mastodon horn and climbed six stories up the outside of the shattered staircase to her office where she managed to save fifteen hundred botanical samples from the herbarium that was her life’s work.
Afterward, escaping San Francisco with little more than the clothes on her back and her favorite Zeiss lens, she remarked of her lost work, “It was a joy to me while I did it; I can still have the same joy in starting it again.” She did exactly that, returning to the California Academy once it was rebuilt in Golden Gate Park. Over a dozen species would be named in her honor, and her portrait hangs in the Academy’s botany department to this day.
Cast of characters—Madame Ning
Madame Ning: aunt to Suling
Owner of the Palace of Endless Joy, the most expensive Chinese brothel in San Francisco. She also supplies women for parties such as Thornton throws.
Thornton shoots her after the earthquake when she comes to the house to collect payment for the women she supplied at the previous evening's gala.
Michael Clarkson: police sergeant in love with Madame Ning in San Francisco. He becomes a Pinkerton detective after her death, and comes to Paris to take custody of Thornton.
Daniel Langford is the Pinkerton detective Thornton killed.
Cast of characters—Henry Thornton (William van Doren)
Henry Thornton: wealthy, ambitious man with investments in railroads, mines, shipping, and real estate. Also a patron of the arts who owns a collection of Chinese antiquities, including the fabled Phoenix Crown.
He "sponsors" Gemma to boost her career, as he previously sponsored Reggie, and several others.
He obtained the "seed money" for his fortune by stealing from the Park Avenue Hotel in New York, which he then set ablaze, a notorious disaster in 1902, and the reason for his burned hand.
After the earthquake, he kills Madame Ning, who has gone to his house to collect payment for the women supplied to his previous night’s ball, and locks Suling, Gemma, Reggie, and Alice in the conservatory and sets fire to the house. He leaves for New York, and then Europe, where he adopts the name William van Doren, probably his real name.
Some time before, Henry Thornton willed his fortune to distant relative William van Doren, which he collects once in Europe, after being declared dead in the earthquake fire.
Reading the society page of a New York newspaper 5 years later, Alice spots him, telegraphs the other 3 women, and they meet in Paris, where Thorton is now engaged to Austrian nobility--Cecelia Arenburg von Loxen.
The women confront him at the Paul Poiret gala, he explains/confesses and is taken into custody.
Questions for discussion
Kate Quinn, as we know, has written a number of novels about women forgotten by history. And the women in this novel are quite diverse. How would you describe them?
What unifies them?
Questions for discussion
Nell, Gemma, and Suling are also orphans. Why is this important to the novel?
Questions for discussion
What does Suling's life add to the story; she's native born but still a resident of Chinatown and a ward of her third uncle?
Questions for discussion
What role does Alice Eastwood play in this novel. What is her relationship with the other women. She doesn't struggle in the same way they do. So what does she represent?
Questions for discussion
What did you think of Thornton?
Questions for discussion
How does the earthquake play into the plot of the novel? What does it represent?
Questions for discussion
Gemma Garland started out as Sally Gunderson, and Reggie started out as Nellie Doyle. Even Thornton is not his real name, which may be Willian van Doren.
Why do so many characters have multiple names?
Questions for discussion
What do you think of the novel's ending—the confrontation of the women with Thornton? Is it dramatic? Is it an appropriate denouement?
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