Kindling: A Guest Post by Jacqueline Winspear
A conclusion twenty years in the making, Maisie Dobbs has grown and changed over time with all of us. Jacqueline Winspear has penned an exclusive essay on how it feels to wrap this incredible series and takes us back to the start of it all.
Hardcover $29.95
The Comfort of Ghosts (B&N Exclusive Edition) (Maisie Dobbs Series #18)
The Comfort of Ghosts (B&N Exclusive Edition) (Maisie Dobbs Series #18)
Hardcover $29.95
The bittersweet conclusion to the bestselling Maisie Dobbs series will have you racing to start it all over again.
The bittersweet conclusion to the bestselling Maisie Dobbs series will have you racing to start it all over again.
If I say too much about The Comfort of Ghosts, it would be too easy to reveal “spoilers” – so I’m going to avoid getting into trouble with readers by revealing specific story details!
When Maisie Dobbs went into production, I thought that was it – my one and only novel would soon be in my hands. However, my editor at Soho Press, the late Laura Hruska, called me to ask what was next in the series. The series? A whole series hadn’t occurred to me, so I played for time to think and pretended someone was at the door, but promised I would get right back with my ideas – and then I scrambled! Fortunately, I had kept a file of “fragments” – tracts of text I had removed from the manuscript before I submitted it to about ten literary agents in the hope that one would read my first ever work of fiction and offer to represent me. That was in 2001, before everyone was sending documents electronically.
I printed each fragment – a paragraph here, a few lines there, a page or two – and realized I had the “kindling” for another five or six novels. Not fuel, not the flame or even a whole storyline – but ideas I could work with, expand, research and perhaps develop into a series from there. That’s when I asked myself what I really wanted to create, and I came to realize a number of elements were crucial to the weaving of each novel.
First, Maisie Dobbs is a professional psychologist-investigator. Aspects of her training would be revealed over time. Second, the novels would be “cross genre” – equal parts history and mystery, blending truths about the past with the powerful archetypal journey through chaos to resolution that forms a good mystery. That led me to delve into what is arguably the ultimate human failing – war itself. Yet I knew this – that there would be an arc to the series, that I would work with the geography of time, the stories featuring Maisie Dobbs and her cadre of fellow characters encompassing a tumultuous period. I don’t think I realized that so much of my research would reflect our present time, even as I traced my way through French and Belgian battlefields or sat for hours in archives reading the letters of ordinary men and women penned in a time of great upheaval, or even as I wept reading the names of tens of thousands of fallen from two world wars etched into memorials across two continents.
Many readers would have liked Maisie Dobbs to remain the same age throughout the series. But life’s not like that–the goalposts tend to move when we are at our most comfortable, so I wanted to explore how my characters might grow and change with time and experience, good and bad, and who they would be when arc of the series came to a close. With The Comfort of Ghosts, I’ve concluded something I set out to accomplish over twenty years ago.