5 books that inspired Canadian writer Katherine Ashenburg
Her latest book is Margaret's New Look
Katherine Ashenburg has been a voracious reader since she was a child — and a nonfiction writer and editor for most of her career.
She published her first fiction book at 72 years old, Sofie & Cecilia, in 2018 – and her most recent novel, Margaret's New Look, explores what happens when a curator's Dior exhibit becomes controversial.
To celebrate its release, she joined Antonio Michael Downing on The Next Chapter to discuss the books that shaped her thinking — including two titles also written by women later in life, Ethel Wilson's Swamp Angel and Penelope Fitzgerarld's The Beginning of Spring.
"A woman is really taught tacitly to be an observer, to watch what's going on between people, to watch whose feelings are hurt, who's trying to take over the conversation or whatever," she said.
"So I think a lifetime of that kind of social observation serves a novelist very well."
Christian Dior by Alexandra Palmer
Ashenburg first's pick was part of the research process for Margaret's New Look. It's called Christian Dior: History and Modernity,1947 - 1957 and draws from the Royal Ontario Museum's (ROM) collection of his couture.
"It's a treasure trove," she said on The Next Chapter. "Even if you think you're not interested in fashion and sewing, it's got anatomies of his clothes … amazing, amazing photographs by a man named Laziz Hamani."
"What gives the book for me a lot of human interest is that the ROM collection was mostly donated by Toronto socialites, women who could afford couture. And Alexandra [Palmer] puts in their stories and humanizes the whole incredibly glamorous, expensive enterprise."
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
As a young girl, Ashenburg was captivated by Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, which follows four sisters in a poor American family as they try to figure out their place in the world.
She was gifted the novel at the age of seven and distinctly remembers lying on her stomach and reading it in her parents' living room.
"I can still feel that rough rug that they had in the living room on my stomach," she said. "I read every single word because I'd only had one year of learning how to read and I didn't know how to skip or skim. And I don't want you to think I was precocious or brilliant. I wasn't. I just loved to read."
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol is a tale featuring four ghostly guests who visit Ebenezer Scrooge, a grumpy and selfish old man, who teach him important lessons about charity, benevolence and goodwill.
Ashenburg clarified that while A Christmas Carol is not her favourite work of Charles Dickens', it inspired her PhD dissertation on the symbolic meaning of Christmas as it evolved in Dickens' work.
"He began his first book ever with a scene of Christmas and, in the book he didn't finish, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, an uncle kills his nephew on Christmas Eve. So the Christmases get darker as his hopes for Victorian England becoming a just and fair society become less and less and less and less."
Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson
Ashenburg moved to Canada at age 23 and Ethel Wilson's Swamp Angel was the first Canadian novel she read.
"I've never read a better Canadian novel," she said. "That's a very big statement, but it is true."
Swamp Angel is a book about Maggie Lloyd, a woman who leaves her husband and Vancouver behind, to work at a fishing lodge in the interior of British Columbia. There, she tries to heal from her past and also help others who are struggling as well.
"It is slim, brilliant, really unconventional, especially for the 1950s when it was published, because there's no romance whatsoever."
The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Beginning of Spring, set in 1913 Moscow, is about a man born whose wife decides to return to England and never come back, abandoning him and his three young children.
"The smells, the sounds, the corners, the crazy things that people in Moscow do are completely convincing to me," said Ashenburg.
"The spirit of place is so strong in this book and she has a kind of comic, very English, kind of stiff upper lip comedy to her writing."
Katherine Ashenburg's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
