Juliet’s Nurse by Lois Leveen – book review and author interview

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Juliet's Nurse - reviewed on savingsinseconds.com

We all know the story about Juliet.  This one, however, is what you need to know before all that romantic nonsense.  It’s about the woman who loved Juliet before Romeo.   As Juliet grows strong from the mothers-milk meant for another baby, she also captures the heart of her wet-nurse.   In turn, the story will capture yours.   It’s an amazing tale that you simply must experience.

Shakespeare, move aside.  Instead of your lengthy poems and acts that merely skim the surface of this amazing woman, we’re reading this beautiful prose about Juliet’s Nurse.  Don’t get me wrong; Juliet’s Nurse uses the same lilting dialogue that we have come to expect from Verona’s elite. There’s enough of a similarity that you don’t forget where you are.  The author clearly did her homework and presents the story from a historically accurate perspective (as far as I could tell!)  However, you might look upon Romeo with different eyes after reading this.  Leveen’s story is emotional in a way that Shakepeare didn’t portray.  Even the cover hums with the richness, the decadence, of the story within its pages. I love the way that this story takes such a different spin on the classic romance that we all know and love. This is the first book I’ve read by author Lois Leveen.  Pretty sure that it won’t be the last.

I had the opportunity to ask Lois some questions about her book.  Check out what she said!

Why did you write Juliet’s Nurse?
 
I was actually struggling with another novel that just wasn’t coming together, and the title “Juliet’s Nurse” came into my head.  I knew the nurse was a comic figure in the play, but the truth was I hadn’t read Romeo and Juliet since high school.  So I pulled my copy off the bookshelf, and discovered how incredibly complex and compelling Shakespeare made her.  In her first scene in the play, we hear this amazing backstory:  she had a daughter who was born the same day as Juliet but died.  What was it like to lose one child, and then immediately take comfort in caring for another in such a physically as well as emotionally intimate way?  We also learn a bit about her husband, and how he interacted with Juliet.  But what was he like?  What was his relationship with Angelica, the nurse?  Later in the play, Angelica describes Juliet’s cousin Tybalt as “the best friend I had,” which is odd because they’re not in a single scene together.  So what was their friendship like?  Even in the play, Angelica is an intensely emotional character, and I sensed that shifting the focus squarely onto her would tease out new aspects of this seemingly well-known story.  And I’m very interested in what history I can learn as I work on my novels.  Here was a way to think about women’s roles in late medieval and early Renaissance Italy, including women of very different class positions.  So really, once the idea came to me, I couldn’t NOT write it.

What kind of historical research went into Juliet’s Nurse?

Lots!  I read medieval cookbooks to plan meals, and medieval medical manuals to figure out how pregnancies, infertility, and breastfeeding would be handled.  I did research on the impact of the plague, to understand how it continued to affect Italian society even after the initial outbreak ended.  I read about fashion, which was key in this period not just in terms of what people wore but because fabric and clothing served as a kind of exchange commodity, the way we might think of currency or precious metals you would pawn or trade.  I read a lot about vendettas and violence, and about marriage contracts.  But the book is set in the era before the printing press was invented, which means the written records are quite limited.  So I found that visual art and material culture were also incredibly helpful.  For example, if a woman was pregnant or had just given birth, one gift she might receive was a parto tray, on which special meals would be served to her.  Those trays often had scenes painted on them, and those scenes would be of women, usually saints, who had just given birth.  So you can look at a tray and see what that parto room would look like:  where is the mother?  where is the child?  where is the wet-nurse?  Even religious objects would be decorated in ways that would reveal what people wore and how they acted in particular situations.  I traveled to Verona while I was working on the manuscript, and during my time there I took over 1,000 photographs just in one day.  Understanding how a private house would be laid out, how frescoes would appear on the walls, what it would have felt like to move through a crowded medieval city—all of that relied on being there in person.  But, of course, you have to be careful not to get so caught up in the research you forget about the story.  The historical details work their way in, but ultimately the novel is about the characters, and what happens to them.

Were you intimidated by taking on Shakespeare?  
Not when I started.  I was so entranced with Angelica, I didn’t hesitate at all.  But last April, after the novel was finished, I spoke at the Shakespeare 450 conference in Paris, probably the world’s largest gathering of Shakespeare scholars, I think participants were there from 80 different countries.  And suddenly I realized the enormity of what I’d done.  Shakespeare, the most famous playwright in English, and Romeo and Julietthe most famous English-language drama.  How could I have been so brazen?  And yet, of course, there’s a huge literary tradition of reinterpreting Shakespeare (not to mention the stage tradition:  pretty much any time you stage a Shakespeare play, you’re “interpreting” the text).  Mostly I’m glad I didn’t think about it until the novel was done.  Ignorance is the better part of bravery, I suppose.
Tell us about your writing process.  For example, do you sit at a desk or on the couch?
I tend to follow the same routine day in and day out.  When I’m working on creative writing, I use a particular laptop computer, not the one I use for email, etc., and I sit in a very comfortable chair, no desk, with at least one and preferably two cats on my lap.  The thesaurus is always in reach, a real book thesaurus which is so much better than the computer’s version.  And I’m surrounded by piles of books and articles so I can research particular points.  I write first thing in the morning, 7 days a week, usually for 3-5 hours.  The rest of the day, I might be reading for a project, or writing *about* writing, doing an interview like this, etc.  Like many writers, I can be crabby when I’m writing, but I’m more crabby if I am not giving myself time to write every day.

In Verona, a city ravaged by plague and political rivalries, a mother mourning the death of her day-old infant enters the household of the powerful Cappelletti family to become the wet-nurse to their newborn baby. As she serves her beloved Juliet over the next fourteen years, the nurse learns the Cappellettis’ darkest secrets. Those secrets—and the nurse’s deep personal grief—erupt across five momentous days of love and loss that destroy a daughter, and a family.

By turns sensual, tragic, and comic, Juliet’s Nurse gives voice to one of literature’s most memorable and distinctive characters, a woman who was both insider and outsider among Verona’s wealthy ruling class. Exploring the romance and intrigue of interwoven loyalties, rivalries, jealousies, and losses only hinted at in Shakespeare’s play, this is a never-before-heard tale of the deepest love in Verona—the love between a grieving woman and the precious child of her heart.

In the tradition of Sarah Dunant, Philippa Gregory, and Geraldine Brooks, Juliet’s Nurse is a rich prequel that reimagines the world’s most cherished tale of love and loss, suffering and survival. – See more at SimonandSchuster.biz.  

Lois Leveen - author of Juliet's Nurse.

Award-winning historian, author, and former college professor LOIS LEVEEN holds degrees in history and literature from Harvard, UCLA, and USC. She traveled to Verona, Italy, to research JULIET’S NURSE, as well as apprenticing herself to an urban beekeeping group in her adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon, to write accurately about the life cycle of hives.

Lois has given talks in Finland, France, and throughout the US about the historical research behind JULIET’S NURSE, and about how she approached challenging themes of teen violence, suicide, and plague epidemics in adapting Shakespeare for contemporary readers. Her first novel, The Secrets of Mary Bowser, based on the true story of an African American woman who spied for the Union during the Civil War by posing as a slave in the Confederate White House, was a 2012 Target Book Club pick and is currently being developed into a Broadway musical.

Connect with Lois: Website  ~  Facebook  ~  Twitter
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Where to buy the book:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Book Depository

Chapters Indigo

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Comments

  1. Sherry Compton says

    Sounds like an interesting take and author. I’m amazed that she was able to take Shakespeare out of the story and make it hers and the nurses. A new twist to the classic and from an important view.

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