Jennifer N. Brown

Jennifer N. Brown is from New York City and after falling in love with Chaucer in college, pursued a Ph.D. in medieval literature. Her dissertation and subsequent books and articles have mostly been about devotional literature and medieval women as authors, subjects, and patrons of literary culture in medieval Europe. She has taught medieval literature at several institutions, most recently at Marymount Manhattan College where she taught in the English and World Literatures department for over 15 years. She is currently serving as the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University in Boston, where she lives with her husband, two children and two miniature dachshunds: Athena and Apollo.

Brown's new novel is The Lost Book of Elizabeth Barton.

My Q&A with the author:

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

This wasn’t the title I was working with when I wrote the book, that title was Remember Death, which is the English translation of Memento Mori, a medieval concept that recurs several times in my novel. However, my editor rightly felt that it doesn’t fully reflect what’s going on in the novel, so it was changed. It was hard to land on a title that referenced both timelines of my book — the Tudor English timeline of Elizabeth Barton and the modern day timeline of Dr. Alison Sage who finds Elizabeth’s book. When we landed on The Lost Book of Elizabeth Barton, I was pleased that we had something that gestured towards both sides of the narrative.

What's in a name?

Well, I’m sure it doesn’t take much for a reader to see “Sage” as an appropriate last name for a professor (but is she sage? You’ll have to see). I chose Alison because it’s a name that speaks of a particular generation of women (like Jennifer does!) and also because it is a name of one of the best characters in medieval literature — Chaucer's Wife of Bath. There are also Easter eggs in the novel for some of my fellow academics in medieval studies, and some of these are in names of characters.

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

Not as surprised as my 20- or 30- or 40-something self. I really wanted to be a writer as a teenager and thought for sure that was my future. I did become a writer, but of academic work, and I think that may have surprised my teenage self more (certainly that I focused on nuns as my subject matter), but in many ways this novel is a return to what teen-Jennifer thought her life may yield.

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

I’ve only written one and a half novels and in both the beginnings came very easily, although I am a happy reviser — my favorite part of any writing process — so I don’t think anything survived the way it was originally written.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart? What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Certainly I am connected to Alison, in that she is an academic in a field adjacent to mine, my age, a mother. There is a lot about her that I don’t relate to or that is not like me, but I understood her in a very natural way. It was harder to place myself in the Tudor era and the figures that populate it. I knew quite a bit about the period and about what people said and did, but it’s one more leap to understand how they feel. For that section, especially, I looked at a lot of paintings and art from the time, surviving jewelry and clothing, letters, and recipes. I tried to construct the world as it was inhabited, and that required mostly non-literary inspiration.

Visit Jennifer N. Brown's website.

--Marshal Zeringue