The book "March" by Geraldine Brooks is our March reading choice. Here is a excerpt from Ms. Brooks website regarding the writing of this historic fiction.
A conversation with Geraldine
Brooks:
In your afterward, you make an amusing apology to your
husband, a well-known writer and Civil War aficionado, for your previous lack
of appreciation for his passion. Although you say you’re not sure “when or
where” it happened, would you talk a bit about your change of heart and what
led to your new and profound interest in the American Civil War and eventually
to the writing of March?
In the early 1990s we came to live in a small Virginia village where
Civil War history is all around us. There are bullet scars on the bricks of the
Baptist church where a skirmish took place; we have a Union soldier’s belt
buckle that was unearthed near the old well in our courtyard. The village was
Quaker, and abolitionist, but in the midst of the Confederacy. The war brought
huge issues of conscience for the townsfolk, a few of whom sacrificed their
nonviolent principles to raise a regiment to fight on the Union side. It was
thinking about the people who once lived in our house, and the moral challenges
the war presented for them, that kindled my interest in imagining an idealist
adrift in that war. I am gripped by the stories of individuals from the generation
Oliver Wendell Holmes so eloquently described when he said: “In our youth our
hearts were touched with fire.” I’m still not all that interested in the order
of battles, I still drive Tony crazy by failing to keep the chronology
straight, and offered the choice between a trip to the dentist and another
midsummer reenactment; it’d be a hard call. But sometimes, alone on a
battlefield as the mists rise over the grass, I feel like a time traveler, born
back by the ghosts of all those vivid, missing boys.
Grace Clement is such an extraordinary character and is
pivotal in shaping March’s life. You tell us that her voice was inspired by an
1861 autobiography, but what inspired you to create a romantic relationship
between Grace and March? Were there any historical hints that Alcott had had
such a relationship?
The idea of an attraction between March and Grace is
entirely imagined and not at all suggested by Bronson Alcott’s biography. It
grew naturally out of the narrative: they are young and attractive when they
first meet, he is an idealist, she is a compelling person in a dramatic and
moving situation. It seemed inevitable to me.
A year after March enlists he says, “One day I hope to go
back. To my wife, to my girls, but also to the man of moral certainty that I
was . . . that innocent man, who knew with such clear confidence exactly what
it was that he was meant to do.” Do you think he can go back? Is it even
possible? Would you discuss how you think March changes by the end of the novel
and what parts of him remain intact?
I don’t think he can go back. Nor do I think it is
necessarily desirable. Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other
than their own. By the end of the book, March is damaged, but he is still an
idealist; it’s just that he sees more clearly the cost of his ideals, and
understands that he is not the only one who must pay for them.
Your book Nine Parts of Desire deals with the issues of
Muslim women. Year of Wonders had a female heroine, Anna Frith. How was it
different writing principally from a man’s point of view this time?
I have always believed that the human heart is the human
heart, no matter what century we live in, what country we inhabit, or what
gender we happen to be. This is a book about strong feelings: love and fear. I
can’t believe there’s much difference in how a man or a woman experiences them.
And then, I had the journals and letters of Bronson Alcott, which are perhaps
as complete a record of a Victorian man’s interior life as any you could find.
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