Elizabeth Hobbs

Elizabeth Hobbs is a New Englander born and bred who spent her childhood roaming the woods, making up stories about characters who live far more exciting lives than she. It wasn’t always so—long before she ever set pen to paper, Hobbs graduated from Hollins College with a BA in classics and art history and then earned her MA in nautical archaeology from Texas A&M University. While she loved the life of an underwater archaeologist, she has found her true calling writing historical mysteries full of wit, wickedness, and adventure. Hobbs writes wherever she is and loves to travel from her home in Texas, where she lives with her husband, the Indispensable Mr. Hobbs, and her darling dogs, Ghillie and Brogue, in an empty nest of an old house filled to the brim with bicycles and books.

Hobbs's new novel is Misery Hates Company.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

A great deal! Misery Hates Company is set on a small—and very real—island just off the north shore of Massachusetts, Great Misery Island. My heroine finds herself unwillingly drawn into family intrigue and murder on the island, so it is a lovely little shorthand for the plot of the novel!

What’s in a name?

I love naming characters. There is something lovely and powerful and delightful about finding just the right name to enhance a story and aid in the reader’s understanding of the character. Since Misery Hates Company is set in New England, I plucked my names off of the graves registration for my own small hometown and read US Census rolls from the 1890’s to find just the right, period-appropriate names that also had a bit of a gothic ‘vibe’ to enhance the atmosphere of the novel like Sophronia and Seviah. But my protagonist, Marigold Manners, is actually named for a distant Hobbs family member, who, when I met her in her very old age, was still as feisty and charming as she must have been in her youth at the turn of the 20th century. And I liked the Language of Flowers association for marigolds (marigolds also represent good luck, warmth, creativity, prosperity, and passion, although they may also symbolize grief, despair and jealousy and be associated with death, remembrance and resurrection) which also played nicely into the murder plot.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

I think she would be absolutely delighted to find exactly what she’s been looking for in a protagonist—a forward-thinking, feminist, New Woman of the Progressive Age in her Gibson Girl shirtwaists and high-piled hair. I would go so far as to say that I created Marigold Manners specifically for my teenaged self! The only thing that would surprise my teenaged, impatient, dreamy, un-focused brain would be that we do indeed have the patience and determination to make our dream of writing a reality. Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Beginnings are both a bane and a delight—I really enjoy the first flush of putting an idea on the page. I love when the heat of an idea or a character comes to me. And I love finding the right words that are going to give me the key to that character—and I absolutely need just the right words to illuminate my character before I can move forward into the plot. So beginnings are a challenge—but a fun challenge. Usually, by the time I get to the end of a book, the words move onto the page far more easily. And in my current series, the Marigold Manners Mysteries, I have a little literary conceit that the first words and the last words echo each other, so once I have the beginning set, I know I have the ending, too.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

For the most part, they are a world apart. I don’t live at the turn of the 20th century, and many of the cultural freedoms and norms I live with are but a distant dream for Marigold Manners. That said, I do think that authors necessarily put a part of themselves—their experiences, opinions and world-view—into their writings one way or another, even if the characters themselves are different.

I suppose that instead of writing a sort of “everywoman,” I like writing a “best version of themselves” character—my characters get to say the witty and timely things that I could never come up with in real life, until the day after. I can give my characters what the French call the “mot d’escalier” or the “staircase word” that would in real life only come to them later, on the staircase on their way out of a situation, instead of in the thick of the moment.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I think doing puzzles of all kinds—Spelling Bee, Wordle, Crosswords and jigsaws—is the biggest non-literary influence that helps me to tease out the plots of my mysteries. I studied to be an archaeologist—I have my M.A. in Nautical Archaeology—and I think the skills and traits that I honed as a working, underwater archaeologist—a sort of sharp, probing curiosity about the world and a delight in figuring something out—continue to influence my writing more than anything else.

Visit Elizabeth Hobbs's website.

--Marshal Zeringue