Imagine spending years toiling in school, studying hard, inching up from bachelor's degree, to master's degree, to doctorate, and then, maybe, to a second doctorate, becoming an expert in your field. And then imagine the world coming to admire and love you not for all of that, but for writing a novel about vampires.
Deborah Harkness — like Diana Gabaldon, Kathy Reichs, Mary Bly and others — is a serious academic, a professor and a scholar, and also a very successful bestselling author of fantastic fiction. It's a fascinating new breed, these scientists and historians who have turned their keen minds to making up stories that spring somehow from their field of expertise.
Reichs, for example, is a forensic anthropologist and a full professor at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, and also the author of a string of bestselling mysteries (starring a forensic anthropologist). Bly is a professor of Shakespeare at Fordham University with degrees from Harvard, Oxford and Yale, and the author (under the pen name Eloisa James) of a string of historically-accurate-down-to-the-buttonhole-and-petticoat historical romances. Bodice rippers, if you will, but accurate bodice rippers.
Gabaldon is a scientist and former professor with advanced degrees in marine biology and quantitative behavioral ecology but is world-famous for her time-traveling "Outlander" series, in which a nurse in 1946 Scotland walks into a ring of stones and ends up in the year 1743 (No. 8 in the series, "Written in My Own Heart's Blood," was published in June).
And Harkness has lived on the New York Times bestseller list for three years with her All Souls trilogy, which is about time travel, vampires, alchemy, a missing manuscript and forbidden passion. She is also a Fulbright and Guggenheim fellow and a professor of history at the University of Southern California.
These writers have all used their professional expertise — how to read bones, how people lived in Shakespearean England — to bring authenticity and accuracy to their novels. (Yes, even when writing about vampires.)
Harkness will be in the Twin Cities at 7 p.m. Tuesday to launch "The Book of Life," last of the All Souls Trilogy. The series follows the story of historian Diana Bishop, who discovers a mysterious rare manuscript and falls in love with a vampire. She will be at Macalester College's Weyerhaeuser Chapel at an event sponsored by Common Good Books.
Here, she talks about how a lost manuscript inspired her first book, and what vampires do all day.
