The Crimson Portrait
by Jody Shields

List Price: $13.99
Pages: 320
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9780316067188
Publisher: Back Bay Books

Q: What inspired you to write The Crimson Portrait?

JS: Inspiration was pure happenstance. I saw a photograph in an art book of a woman holding a paintbrush to a man’s face. The caption identified Anna Coleman as the artist who created faces for injured soldiers. This brief information was captivating, mysterious, and inexplicable.

Q: It is clear you did extensive research into the World War I era. What did your research encompass?

JS:Research is a kind of pilgrimage. I wandered through memoirs of famous socialites and obscure governesses, surgeons who worked on the battlegrounds, nurses, hospital volunteers, collections of soldier’s letters and diaries, and medical publications. Newspapers written by patients in hospitals were very evocative and intimate, filled with inside jokes and cartoons. I also read restaurant and shopping guides, mythology and mythological acts of transformation (especially Ovid’s Metamorphoses). Also encountered a trove of astonishing medical photographs and vintage film.

Q: Does the estate where the story is set have a real-life counterpart? If so, did you spend time there?

JS: During World War I, the wealthy and the titled voluntarily turned over their homes (and even yachts) to be converted into hospitals or lodging for soldiers. Churches and schools were also put to the same use. A large estate south of London that became a hospital is the setting of The Crimson Portrait. I spent time in the archives at this estate (miraculously preserved since World War I) and discovered boxes of medical records, wax models of heads, and facial prosthetics.

Q: At the end of the war, Anna and Catherine find their lives have changed in positive and negative ways. Is this representative of women at this time?

JS:While men were away at war, women took over their jobs, working everywhere from factories to farms. When the war ended, a great percentage of the women relinquished their jobs and returned to housewife status, but obviously this work experience had an immeasurably transforming effect.

Q: Some of the characters in The Crimson Portrait are based on actual people. How did you go about creating fictional characters and incorporating them into the novel along with characters modeled on actual people?

JS: The purely fictitious characters and the characters inspired by actual people found their way into the story without advance planning. It is one of the many strange, unpredictable, pleasant events that can happen when writing fiction.


© Copyright 2012 by Jody Shields. Reprinted with permission by Back Bay Books. All rights reserved.

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