Stephanie Cowell

Before turning to novel writing, Stephanie Cowell was an opera singer, balladeer, founded an outdoor arts series in New York City's Bryant Park, a Renaissance festival, a chamber opera company and many other things. She has lived in New York City all her life, indeed in the same apartment building for fifty-two years in the neighborhood (and sometimes down the block) where they filmed You've Got Mail. Cowell has loved England and Europe all her life and traveled there almost every year.

Her new novel is The Man in the Stone Cottage.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I can’t remember when I chose my title, but I feel it has air of mystery about it. Who could this man be? I found a very early draft of the novel from years ago from Charlotte’s pov but it eventually became more of Emily’s journey and the title changed. I was always so drawn to the remoteness of half-ruined houses/cottages on the Yorkshire moors -- the loneliness of them, the allure. I first saw such cottages in my adolescence and climbed in one and wondered if the owner would step through time and come in. I could see him standing in the doorway.

What's in a name?

The Man in the Stone Cottage is about real people, the Brontë sisters who wrote Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, etc. so those names are factual. The only fictional characters are a minor one and of course, the mysterious titular character, the shepherd. I don’t recall why I called him Jonathan, but his surname is a common for the island of St. Kilda from where he comes (or says he comes). I feel that is a strong, solid name…a man who says plainly who he is and what he stands for, a man you can count on. And he is…but…well you will have to read the book to see the “but” in that.

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

My adolescent self would not believe that she would write something so emotionally and technically complicated. I was fourteen when I read Wuthering Heights and likely Jane Eyre and I didn’t conceive of someone actually sitting down to write them. They were just there, these incredible books. I wrote a historical novel back then and have not the courage to look at it if I still have it. But I think I wrote simple things like, “The boy rode his horse into the battle.” I could not comprehend the complicated mixture of plot, place, character development that is a finished novel. As an adolescent, I felt taking the summer to do a book was a lot. I never dreamed of the struggles and despair and rising joy it would take to do one…and the sometimes many years.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Beginnings are the worse. I can revise and rewrite them many times because I don’t truly know the best beginning until I write the whole story. The beginning leads the reader into the book. I cannot remember how many ways I rewrote the beginning of The Man in the Stone Cottage. Only when I discovered that Emily and her inner life was the main lead in the story and that subsequently this intense relationship with a handsome man who may be partially from her mind -- then I knew my beginning.

I then began the book again when she was a child of perhaps twelve years old, and wandering alone, finding the ruined cottage in an isolated part of the moors. It is quite deserted. She spends hours there and makes up stories. Then she grows up and forgets about it for many years until one day, she finds it again and the shepherd who is now living there.

For The Man in the Stone Cottage, I had the ending many months before the book became final.

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

I very much see myself in the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne. They are all parts of my own character. Part of me is hidden and mystical like Emily, feeling the presence of people others may not see. Part of me is determined to make my world succeed like Charlotte. The third sister in the novel, Anne, proceeds quietly forward in life without fuss. I would love to have more of Anne in me. My friends say I do but I don’t believe it.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

It is very difficult to pinpoint this because so much of my life and the things I have seen and done have influenced my writing. I’d say first it is travel: at age 23 and quite alone, I went to the Brontë parsonage now a museum in the village on a steep hill in Yorkshire England. Stumbling over the moors with a friend and then walking the rooms where the Brontë family lived put down seeds in me which would not turn into a novel for many decades later.

My second inspiration is music. Mozart showed me the structures which I then used in writing: a theme repeated, a surprise turn, suddenly pianissimo (very soft) and then fortissimo (very loud) and building to the end.

Third is old houses and furnishings which as a historical novelist I love. There is a museum in NYC with a medieval stair which I have stared at for a long time until I feel people from centuries ago descending it. I am mystical like Emily Brontë! Another influence is family and personal relations. Lastly is the weary struggle for enough money. That was a huge thing in my life when I was a young woman and later a single mom of two boys. Being unable to pay bills was a very big worry.

Visit Stephanie Cowell's website.

The Page 69 Test: Claude & Camille.

The Page 69 Test: The Man in the Stone Cottage.

--Marshal Zeringue