The Brattleboro Literary Festival begins its 2024 season with authors Virginia Pye and Whitney Scharer. They will be in conversation about their latest works of historical fiction.
Virginia Pye's "The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann" is set in Gilded Age Boston. It tells the story of a successful woman author of romance and adventure novels who becomes a champion of women's rights as she takes on the literary establishment and finds her true voice. Everything changes for Victoria when she goes against her publisher's expectations and abandons her frivolous style to tell her own story.
In Whitney Scharer's book, "The Age of Light," Lee Miller declares "I'd rather take a photograph than be one," after she arrives in Paris in 1929, where she soon catches the eye of the famous Surrealist Man Ray. Though he wants to use her only as a model, Lee convinces him to take her on as his assistant and teach her everything he knows.
Virginia Pye is the author of four books of fiction. Her short story collection, "Shelf Life of Happiness," won the 2019 IPPY Gold Medal for Short Fiction. Her two post-colonial historical novels, "River of Dust" and "Dreams of the Red Phoenix "have also received literary awards.
Whitney Scharer's first novel, "The Age of Light," based on the life of pioneering photographer Lee Miller, was published in February, 2019, and was a Boston Globe and IndieNext bestseller and named one of the best books of 2019 by Parade, Glamour Magazine, Real Simple, Refinery 29, Booklist and Yahoo.
The evening will be facilitated by Brattleboro Literary Festival committee member Jenny Altshuler.