Brigitte Dale

Brigitte Dale is an author, editor, and historian. She graduated from Brown University and earned her master's degree in women's history at Yale University. A book editor by day and an author by night (or early morning), Dale lives in Connecticut. The Good Daughters is her first novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

My book is called The Good Daughters, but for a very long time while I was writing my first drafts, I called it The Jail Keeper's Daughter. One of my main characters, Emily, is in fact the daughter of the warden of Holloway Prison, the notorious jail where suffragettes were imprisoned in London. When Emily comes face to face with a young suffragette, Charlotte, on the other side of her father's prison bars, she's forced to confront the similarity of their lives, and begins to work in secret on the behalf of the women's suffrage campaign. Eventually, that title didn't serve the story well enough, because it's bigger than just Emily. The Good Daughters is about four wildly different young women at the frontlines of the battle for women’s suffrage. All four women weigh their familial and societal expectations with their own ambitions and sense of justice. That's how The Good Daughters came to be the title (and, of course, the meaning of "good" changes as the story develops).

What's in a name?

I love coming up with character names. Emily is perfect for a working class girl from a simple background; she was raised to never cause trouble. Charlotte, Beatrice, and Sadie are all names that serve the characters' personalities (and I just like them!). The most important characters to name intentionally were Adeline and Isabel Hurston, a mother-daughter team that leads the suffragette campaign in the book. The Hurstons are stand-ins for the real historical figures, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, who led the Women's Social and Political Union. I fictionalized enough of the story to justify changing their names, but I hoped the astute reader might pick up on the parallels.

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

There are two answers to this question. First of all, my teenage self would be inspired, enraged, and captivated by the story of the suffragettes, a story she never learned in school. She'd be devastated that the incredible perseverance, resilience, and determination that these women demonstrated over more than a decade fighting for the vote is barely a footnote in most history classes, and I know this book would spark her desire to learn more.

Secondly, my teenage self would be absolutely thrilled that she (I) wrote and published a novel! It's been a lifelong dream to become an author, and I know she'd be blown away that this dream came true.

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

I didn't know how this novel would end, even though I knew how this historical era concluded. My characters needed personal journeys, not just historical benchmarks, and so although we all know women eventually won the right to vote, I needed to find an equally satisfying ending for each characters' personal arc. That said, the novel is circular; it opens with the ending, and that actually never changed across my many drafts. If you read the first page, you'll know how the book ends--but you have to read the rest of it to figure out exactly what happened and why!

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

I fell in love with all four of my main characters. Charlotte is independent and bold, Emily is quietly fierce, Beatrice is unexpectedly daring, and Sadie is deeply passionate. But if I had to choose a favorite, I think it’s Charlotte: she embodies the bravery and fearlessness I sometimes wish I had more of myself.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I studied women’s history in my undergraduate and master’s programs, and did on-the-ground research in London’s archives to uncover the story of the suffragettes. When I decided to write The Good Daughters, I knew I wanted to draw on that research, and although my characters are fictional, their experiences are based on real historical figures and events. Suffs: The Musical premiered on Broadway after I finished writing, but it's a fantastic representation of the American story of women's suffrage activists (and that soundtrack helped me power through revisions and copy edits!).

Visit Brigitte Dale's website.

--Marshal Zeringue