This one's for those of you who love historical fiction set in Boston as well as books related to writing and stories of finding yourself! We're chatting with author Virginia Pye about her most recent book "The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann". Bring your questions as this will be a rapid fire Q&A!

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About the book: Set in Gilded Age Boston, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann 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, both on and off the page.

Everything changes for Victoria when she goes against her publisher’s expectations and abandons her frivolous style to tell her own story. She loses her income, her husband, and her standing with her publisher as she joins the legions of hard-working women who have been her most faithful readers. As she fights on behalf of these women, her new young Harvard-educated editor becomes her unexpected ally, while he himself dares to become a more liberated, modern gentleman. The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann shows writing and reading as acts of defiance that can liberate us from narrow, constrained lives—and how revision in life and revision on the page are intimately entwined.

About the Author: Virginia Pye is an award-winning author of novels and short stories. Her short story collection, Shelf Life of Happiness, (Press 53) won the 2019 Independent Publisher Gold Medal for Short Fiction, and one of its stories was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Virginia’s debut novel, River of Dust, (Unbridled Books), was an Indie Next Pick and a 2013 Finalist for the Virginia Literary Award. Her second novel, Dreams of the Red Phoenix, (Unbridled Books), was named a Best Book of 2015 by the Richmond Times Dispatch.

Her latest novel, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann, will be published by Regal House Publishing in October 2023.

Virginia graduated from Wesleyan University and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She has been a Tin House Summer Workshop Scholar, an assistant at the Virginia Quarterly Review Conference, and a repeat fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. A prolific writer, her essays have appeared in Literary Hub, The New York Times,The Rumpus, Huffington Post, and the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, as well as numerous literary magazines. She is Fiction Editor for Pangyrus, a literary journal based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a board member of the Women’s National Book Association, Boston Chapter. She’s taught writing at New York University and the University of Pennsylvania, and, most recently, at GrubStreet’s Muse and Marketplace Conference in Boston.

Virginia Pye grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and moved back after thirty-five years living up and down the East Coast. Upon returning, she was struck by how Boston, and specifically Cambridge, is noticeably more bookish than all the other cities where she’d lived.

This program is made possible through a partnership with the Ashland Public Library and is sponsored by the Friends of the Ashland Public Library.