Charlie Lovett writes books about people who love books – enough to lie, steal, and even kill for them.
The best-selling North Carolina author visited the Vero Beach Book Thursday to discuss his latest novel, “First Impressions,” published by Viking last week.
Named after an early title of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” the novel – a mystery with a literary twist – will intrigue not only Lovett’s own fans but also Vero’s myriad Austen aficionados.
Silver Shores resident Gail Brown is one of them. Her passion for all things Austen has led her not only to collect the novelist’s books herself but also to open an online shop, Lady Fran’s Library on the vintage marketplace Etsy.com, which sells Austen editions.
“I can’t wait to read ‘First Impressions,’” she says. “I love poking around London bookstores like that in which it is set, and of course a good contemporary novel centered on Jane Austen is cause for celebration.”
Austen appears in Lovett’s novel as an unpublished author whose friendship with an elderly clergyman, Richard Mansfield, supports her writing. As their bond deepens, Mansfield’s suggestions prompt Austen to hone the book she is still calling “First Impressions,” transforming it from a novel constructed in letters into the unified narrative we read today.
Entwined with Lovett’s fictionalized account of Austen’s life is a contemporary story centered on another young woman, literary scholar Sophie Collingwood. When Sophie stumbles upon a book that suggests Austen may have actually plagiarized “Pride and Prejudice” from Mansfield, her quiet life fills with danger.
”Sophie’s character is steeped in the world of English literature,” the author says. He adds that just as she is reminiscent but not identical to Austen’s own heroines, the two romantic interests in Sophie’s life gently echo Darcy and Wickham, the two leading men in “Pride and Prejudice.” As in Austen’s novel, the reader is not quite sure which of the two is trustworthy until late in the tale.
Asked how he approached fictionalizing someone as beloved – and as exhaustively written about – as Austen has become, Lovett explains that the secret was a bit of distance.
“The obvious thing to do when you’re writing about a historical character is to read lots of biographies. That’s exactly what I didn’t want to do,” he says.
Once he got the factual information of her life down, he turned instead to her fiction.
“I thought it would be much more interesting to work backwards, reading her novels to imagine what sort of person would write them,” he says. “Obviously, someone with a great sense of humor, someone intelligent, someone who is bold and quietly revolutionary, but also someone who is genuinely likable.”
“It’s hard to read her novels and not think that she would be really fun to have dinner with,” he adds.
Lovett comes by his fascination with literature naturally. A native of Winston-Salem, NC, and a graduate of the state’s Davidson College, he is the son of an English professor. He entered the antiquarian book business in the 1980s, about the same time he began collecting books himself.
His personal passion was Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll of Alice in Wonderland fame. Lovett has now written five books and myriad shorter works on the Victorian author. He is a former president of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America and editor of the Lewis Carroll Review. Today, Lovett is proud to possess Carroll’s 1888 typewriter, among other Dodgson memorabilia.
Lovett earned an MFA in writing from Vermont College in 1997. Maya Angelou praised his nonfiction book “Love, Ruth” as “tender, sensitive and true,” while his plays for children have been staged in over 3,000 productions.
But according to Lovett, his first foray into fiction wasn’t auspicious. “I wrote my first novel-length manuscript in the early 1990s,” he has written wryly, “and with luck it will never see the light of day.”
Major literary success came about only when he used his background in antiquarian bookselling in a mystery entitled “The Bookman’s Tale.” Its subtitle, “A Novel of Obsession,” accurately describes the intensity with which some of its characters approach rare books.
“You look through history and you see people who have been obsessed by books to the point of committing fraud,” Lovett says, citing real-life book forger Mark Hofmann as an example.
In Lovett’s novel, rare book dealer Peter Byerly discovers a manuscript that may answer the enduring question of whether William Shakespeare wrote his own plays. His find would be priceless – if it is authentic. Clues span the centuries, reaching from the present all the way back to Shakespeare’s own lifetime.
Described by Library Journal as “compulsively readable until the thrilling end,” “The Bookman’s Tale” won both popular and critical praise, made the New York Times bestseller lists, and was chosen by Parade magazine as one of their top ten summer reads in 2013. As a friend of Lovett’s commented, “It’s the old case of the man who takes 20 years to become an overnight success.”
From those obsessed with Shakespeare to those obsessed by Austen was a natural progression for Lovett.
In addition to their focus on literary icons, both “The Bookman’s Tale” and “First Impressions” also share a second element: the English countryside, which the author cites as a profound inspiration.
Though their primary residence is in North Carolina, Lovett, his wife Janice and daughter Jordan lived in the English village of Kingham in Oxfordshire for six months in the late 1990s. In 2007, they discovered that the cottage they had lived in was for sale, and bought it.
They rent it to visitors for most of the time, but the family tries to spend a few weeks in the cottage every year. The part-time British home base helps Lovett soak up the landscapes that feature prominently in his books.
Lovett isn’t speaking about his next novel yet, but says that perhaps surprisingly, Lewis Carroll isn’t a likely subject.
Explaining why he won’t be writing fiction about the author he loves any time soon, Lovett points to his expertise on the subject as an obstacle rather than an advantage. “It sounds funny, but I’m too close to it – I know it too well,” he says. “Knowing the minutia of his biography would be restricting on me as a novelist, as would being so close to all of the other people who have written about him.”
It seems fitting that the theme of Lovett’s next book about literary mysteries is left a literary mystery itself, if only for now.