Hist-Fic Chick

It is my pleasure to welcome author Sarah Blake for an interview today. Her bestselling book The Postmistress tells the story of two women—one, a reporter covering the blitz in London, another an American postmistress who manages the mail in a small town in Massachusetts—whose lives cross paths in the days leading up to World War II. The Postmistress was highly praised by The New York Times‘ Books of the Times. Berkley Trade recently published the paperback edition of this heart-wrenching and evocative novel.

In your recent article in The Telegraph, you discuss how early women war correspondents changed the traditional reporting vantages previously employed by men: “Wars happened beyond the borders of battlefields. A war story became a portrait painted of civilians as much as soldiers.” Would you say that women were better able to articulate how war affected the home front partially because of their tradition roles (“to be seen and not heard”) at home? That it took a feminine touch to unveil this new perspective? Why weren’t men tapping into this angle?

American war correspondent Martha Gellhorn

During the Spanish Civil War and then into World War II the battlegrounds of war shifted into the streets of towns and farmlands, directly involving civilians in a way that was not true of the First World War. The story of war, “the face of war” as Martha Gellhorn, the great early correspondent called it, shifted to include people caught in their houses, caught in their lives, and in large part because women were barred by US Military policy from covering combat, this became the beat of women reporters. I think this new perspective as you call it was probably a great example of what happens when frontiers open up and women are there to walk across, bringing their particular lens with them.

I find it fascinating how Sigrid Schultz—’the dragon lady of Chicago’—used her gender to her advantage by “[flying] under the radar as a woman,” ingratiating herself amongst the high ranks of German society and writing articles under the pen name John Dickson. Did many women write under male pseudonyms?

Sigrid Schultz, a female investigative reporter who penetrated the ranks of the Nazis and reported on what was going on behind the scenes in pre-war Germany.

I didn’t come across any other women who wrote under a male pseudonym in my research. It’s important to note that Schultz only wrote as John Dickson toward the end of her long tenure as Berlin bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, when it got too dangerous for her to file the stories about Nazi buildups under her own name. Eventually, she had to flee the country.

The New York Times commended The Postmistress’s “ability to strip away readers’ defenses of wartime uncertainty and infuse that chaos with wrenching immediacy and terror.” What was the most challenging part of writing a book set during such a heavy era?

Probably the biggest challenge came from figuring out how to pull the enormous amount of research about World War II into the service of my own story, and how to make what is such a large topic alive in a small, human way. The danger of research is that it can overwhelm the story one is trying to tell, and in some ways the challenge to a writer of historical fiction is to make all the work invisible, so that the world of the novel is only the world the characters inside it see and know.

Were there any real-life women reporters who inspired your character Frankie Bard?

Reporter Dorothy Thompson

Martha Gellhorn was an inspiration for Frankie, as well as Dorothy Thompson, Helen Kirkpatrick, Sigrid Shultz, and Mary Marvin Breckinridge (the only woman to broadcast for Edward R. Murrow). These women were passionate, articulate and brave–and finally, brilliant at capturing the tiny human moments in the midst of the wide spectrum of war.

Do you have plans for your next novel, or any idea as to which time period it will cover?

My next novel follows two generations of the same family, moving back and forth between 1959 and 2009 in the same big old summer house on the coast of Maine. The secrets of the past are never known to the generation in the present, though what happened in 1959 was a tipping point for this old money family that has run out of money. I’m interested in 1959 as a tipping point as well in the larger culture, the moment before the sixties erupted, but where all the fuses for that explosion were laid.

What are you reading now?

Right now I’m reading Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose.

About the Author
SARAH BLAKE is the New York Times bestselling author of The Postmistress, as well as a chapbook of poems, Full Turn, an artist book, Runaway Girls—in collaboration with the artist Robin Kahn—and Grange House, which was named a “New and Noteworthy” paperback in 2001 by the New York Times. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Good Housekeeping, US News and World Reports, and The Chicago Tribune. She lives in Washington DC with her husband, the poet Joshua Weiner, and their two sons.