The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann

(Paperback)

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Description

Set in Gilded Age Boston, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann tells the story of a successful woman author of romance and adventure novels who becomes a champion of womens rights as she takes on the literary establishment and finds her true voice, both on and off the page. Everything changes for Victoria Swann when she goes against her publishers expectations and abandons her frivolous writing style in favor of telling her own story. This seemingly personal decision causes her to lose her standing with her publisher, her income, and her marriage, as she joins the legions of hard-working young women who have been her most faithful readers. Her new young Harvard educated editor becomes her surprising ally as she fights on behalf of these same women, while he dares himself to become a more liberated, modern gentleman. The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann shows how writing and reading, like all acts of defiance, can liberate us from narrow, constrained livesand how revision in life and revision on the page are intimately entwined.

Reviews

"An engrossing and empowering historical novel of liberation that reminds us, with deep resonance, of the many ways in which we are still not free."--Christopher Castellani, author of Leading Men
"The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann is a captivating and delicious novel." --Margot Livesey, author of The Boy in the Field
"Virginia Pye has written a novel as full of vital ideas about truth, progress and how to live with intention as it is with wild romps and charming encounters." --Elizabeth Graver, author of Kantika
"Virginia Pye's novel invites us into a distant era that--in its depiction of the challenges faced by women of letters --seems hauntingly familiar. But Victoria Swann persists--and prevails! The story of her Undoing is generous, fierce, and inspiring." --Jennifer Finney Boylan, Co-author (with Jodi Picoult), MAD HONEY

Author Bio

Virginia Pye's story collection Shelf Life of Happiness won the 2019 IPPY Gold Medal for Short Fiction and her two historical novels set in China, Dreams of the Red Phoenix and River of Dust, also received literary awards. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is Fiction Editor at Pangyrus and has taught writing at NYU, UPenn, and at GrubStreet Writing Center in Boston. www.virginiapye.com