Thus, many themes, motifs, and symbols common in chivalric romance have made their way into Lady Macbeth. So I read a lot of medieval chivalric romance, specifically Marie de France’s lais-the idea being that this is the literature my protagonist would read and she might then emulate some of its qualities when telling her story. Reid: When I set myself the rather ambitious task of “telling Lady Macbeth’s story,” I wanted it to feel, in some sense, like it was the way a young woman of the time would articulate her own narrative. Paste: What is the most intriguing or weirdest thing you can preview for us about this story? What will readers be surprised to find in it? ![]() These seeds are in Shakespeare’s play I like to think of my book as coaxing them out of the earth and cultivating their strange flowers. This is an irrepressibly feminist novel about a woman exerting herself within a bleakly patriarchal environment. Equally important to me was the feminist reading of her character-her gender is crucial to the way she exercises power and agency within the narrative, and crucial to the way she articulates and understands her own identity (the “unsex me here” monologue is so famous for a reason!) Reid: Lady Macbeth’s most well-known traits are her ambition and her wiles, and I wanted to be sure to retain those, as they’re so essential to her character. Paste: What, if anything, did you want to make sure you kept from Shakespeare’s version of her character? My Lady is calculating, chameleonic, conflicted-and, at times, obscure even to herself. In addition to giving her a name, a backstory, and a breadth and depth of fears and desires, I wanted to honor the enigmatic nature of her legacy. It might sound paradoxical, but I chose to portray this obscurity in a very visible way, which is even depicted on the cover: the Lady’s face is covered diaphanously by a veil, though one of her eyes peeks out in what could be an intentional design, or a mere coincidence of the falling cloth. It’s a testament to Shakespeare’s art that she is a complex and compelling character even without these facts. ![]() We learn nothing of her backstory we don’t even learn her first name. For such a famous character, Lady Macbeth is remarkably mysterious. Reid: I was inspired just as much by the absence of knowledge as the presence. Paste: Lady Macbeth is my favorite character in all of Shakespeare, so I cannot tell you how excited I am for this book! What about her story spoke to you as a writer? What did you want most to change about it? But when she learns that her new husband has supernatural secrets of his own, and an appetite for violence not easily sated, she must call upon her arcane magic-not only to survive, but to transform the very order of the world. She moves carefully, subtly accumulating power where she can, while maintaining a mask of innocent fragility. His court bristles with suspicion at their lord’s new foreign wife, who is rumored to have the stain of witchcraft upon her. ![]() My book casts Lady Macbeth as a young bride, married off against her will to the guileful and dangerous Thane of Glammis. It’s set in medieval Scotland, but it takes historical liberties-as Shakespeare himself did-in order to craft a world that feels, I hope, as darkly magical as the original. Here’s how the publisher describes the story.Īva Reid : Lady Macbeth is a reimagining of Shakespeare’s play, from the perspective of its famous villainess. ![]() (And the reputation such actions inevitably give rise to, whether it’s deserved or not.) And while Reid’s take on the Bard’s most famous female character, titled simply Lady Macbeth, promises to have plenty of dark magic and a brooding gothic atmosphere, it is also simply a story of the choices and compromises a woman must make to survive and thrive in a patriarchal environment. Now, she’ll tackle the story of one of Shakespeare’s most iconic-and perhaps most misunderstood-characters: Lady Macbeth. From Madeline Miller’s Circe to Genevieve Gornichec’s The Witch’s Heart, this subgenre is home to some of the most rich and fascinating storytelling hitting shelves right now.Īuthor Ava Reid has leaned into feminist retellings in the past, incorporating elements of Hungarian history and Jewish mythology into The Wolf and the Woodsman and putting her own spin on the story of The Juniper Tree with Juniper and Thorn. One of the most welcome trends in publishing in recent years has been its embrace of feminist retellings of classic literature, stories that reimagine famous works from female perspectives or that give the women we’ve long been told were afterthoughts on good days, or outright villains on their worst their voices back.
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