How Rain Dodging Came to Be

Two blogs ago, I wrote about my current writing progression for Rain Dodging. But where did the book’s idea come from? 

Working on my second master’s degree, I was blessed to attend Oxford’s Lincoln College at for a term and fortunate to conduct literary research with Dr. Peter McCullough, esteemed Oxford professor and Sohmer Fellow of Renaissance Literature, also Lay Canon in History at St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. For five invigorating summer weeks, I studied Eighteenth Century Literature and the Arts with the brilliant and sweet Peter. Only five others in the tutorial, we met three times a week in Peter’s spacious study in Lincoln’s Front Quad. We sat in front of the fireplace, three of us in armchairs and two on the soft, upholstered couch. Peter always sat in his chair, to the left of the fireplace.

In the 18^th century, the Garden was the intersection of the natural and divine. 

Our studies varied. For instance, we scrutinized passages concerning Gardens in Paradise Lost and looked at an excerpt from a Virgil poem translated by John Dryden, Georgic II, which contrasts city and country life and symbolically connects the pastoral to Jacobean royal politics of the time. During one session, I discovered the literary essayist Joseph Addison, sending me on a search that resulted in an absorbing paper on imagination: I know when I have found the seed of a literary quest. Something inside of me clicks. 

Another two-and-a-half-hour tutorial found us scratching the surface of the Alexander Pope poem Windsor Forest, in delight. Peter would jump out of his armchair, a curly dark-brown lock falling over his glasses, to look up a word in the online Oxford English Dictionary at his desk computer. Peter’s course energized me, making constant connections between history, literature, and artistic movements.

We also traveled throughout London and the Cotswold’s, exploring architecture and manor garden designs.

While researching my last paper for Peter about Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea and her poem, Nocturnal Reverie, I stumbled onto the late-17^th century court of Queen Mary of Modena, consort to James II. There was something about her story that intrigued me. It just clicked. Before heading back to the states, I met with Peter to discuss a book idea stemming from that research. Peter, having stunned me with his compliment of my paper—“One of the most beautiful Bread Loaf papers I’ve read . . . The work of an artist by an artist”—was encouraging about my book idea. True to his MO, Peter dashed to his computer and gathered up a beginning bibliography for me to pursue. 
 
Enter devout Maria Beatrice Anna Margherita Isabella of Modena.:

The duchy of Modena was a small but powerful Italian state that existed for four-hundred years, from the mid-15^th to the mid-19^th centuries. Maria Beatrice was an educated, artistic princess growing up in a matriarchy of strong, prominent women. Her father, the Duke of Modena, died at age twenty-seven from tuberculosis. Maria’s widowed mother, Laura Martinozzi, ruled her estates and her family with wisdom and intelligence. She was one of the famed seven Mazarinettes,nieces of the very influential Cardinal Jules Mazarin. Maria’s aunts, the legendary “Mancini sisters,” were among the first women to publish memoir, in part to give evidence of their abusive marriages. Hortense and Maria were pioneering free spirits, feminists long before the word existed.

Maria Beatrice Anna Margherita Isabella of Modena, Mary of Modena, was exposed to powerful women all of her young life as a daughter of a Mazarinette. However, in 1673, she was powerless, a 14-year-old, unwilling political pawn, instructed to marry James, then still the Duke of York, by proxy. It was not unusual for girls to marry this young in the 17^th century, but she refused more than once, insisting that she needed to live a life of study in religious seclusion. 

Eventually, family pressure intervened. Pope Clement himself, in a handwritten note, heavily leaning on Maria’s devotion to Church, convinced the young princess of her duty to spread Catholicism across the channel. Married by proxy, Maria left home on her 15^th birthday, after two days and night of tears and anguish. 

What was it about Mary of Modena (pronounced mo’ di nə/) that intrigued me? From the time she had been Duchess of York through her reign as queen-consort to James II, Mary of Modena had women in her court who were artists and writers, including the poet of my ‘Peter paper,’ Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea. A court of women artists and writers was uncommon for the time. How did this come to be?

I had a seed of an idea germinating. I knew I needed to pursue. Put on my detective hat.
            
Back at home in Tennessee, time permitting, I was reading books related to the topic, but I suffered disruptions of focus and rhythm in research while I waited for books to arrive through interlibrary loan, compounded by a heavy, demanding teaching schedule. I often felt disoriented and subsequently overwhelmed. I also realized that without the ability to visit settings, my writing would lack sense of place. At times, it was hard to keep motivated. 

Just in time, after its first year of existence, I applied for a fellowship offered by my employer, University School of Nashville, an independent K-12 school and acclaimed by many to be the best school in the city. Proudly, I was on the English faculty. 

I may have been a fuck-up when it came to men, but I have a gift when it comes to understanding children. 

I received the fellowship! That summer, five years later, I was back in Oxford, to continue my study of the complexity of Mary’s court culture and to uncover as much as I could about these women and their unique literary and artistic accomplishments, so unusual for the seventeenth century. I had questions I felt compelled to answer regarding this captivating story.

What exactly was court culture?
How might these women have interacted, inspired each other?
What was Mary’s role?

Part of the joy of research—and for me it is joyful—is the ability to explore freely. I wanted to sense their spaces, to breathe the same air, to imagine their lives.  

I was off and running, rain dodging in Britain!