Atlanta History Center

Q&A with Taylor M. Polites

You are obviously inspired by the Southern Gothic genre, but who are your favorite authors of all time, and why?

The Southern Gothic, and Gothic literature more generally, seemed a natural atmospheric extension of the history and mood of the Reconstruction period.  The fact that the South has its own Gothic form speaks volumes already about the nature of its history and society.  While I love the mood of the Gothic, I have always been drawn to the more romantic or comedic novels of the 19th century.  After Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, which I became obsessed with at the age of 13, I read my way through the nineteenth century into the early twentieth.  I have always loved Jane Austen and reread Pride and Prejudice every now and then.  What a wonderful character Elizabeth Bennett is!  Becky Sharp in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair is a delight.  I love the Brontës, that crazy, relentless Cathy in Wuthering Heights and, of course, Jane Eyre.  The political dramas of Anthony Trollope were always a favorite and the great tragedies of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary.  All the way up to Henry James’ Isabel Archer and Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart.  I seem obsessed with female heroines!

What was your biggest challenge in researching the story for The Rebel Wife?

Capturing Augusta’s voice was critical to the story and probably the biggest challenge.  There were obstacles, of course, in writing a woman’s voice, but to write a woman of 1875 with verisimilitude seemed almost a deranged quest.  Fortunately, the research led me to many wonderful guides.  My first and favorite is the always amazing Mary Chesnut.  C. Vann Woodward’s scholarly work with her diaries has given us a window into the heart of this person, very much a woman of her time, but with ambitions and frustrations that we can all understand.  Very often before sitting down to write, I would randomly open up the heavy volume of her diary and begin reading.  Her voice is so strong and beautiful.  I also turned to books of letters and those of Kate Fearn Steele of Huntsville, Alabama in the collection Cease Not to Think of Me are equally beautiful and honest.  She writes the most passionate letters to her husband and then talks about local gossip and events, in particular the health of EVERYONE.  Good health or bad, details of sickness, rumors of sickness and what kind, fill her letters.  Absolutely fascinating!

Who/what was your inspiration for the characters of Augusta and Judge?

I have a little thing for strong female protagonists, so that was the starting point for Augusta.  Also, anyone who writes Southern historical fiction with a strong female character cannot get away from Scarlett O’Hara—and who would want to?  But there were many other female heroines, real (like Mary Chesnut or Kate Fearn Steele) and fictional (like Lily Bart or Becky Sharp) that helped inform who my heroine would be.  Working inside the archetype of the Southern belle was great.  In the same way, I worked inside the archetype of the Southern gentleman as I developed Judge.  He was a very strong and single-minded man.  He was a firebreather like Alabama’s William Lowndes Yancey, agitating for secession and war.  And when defeat came, he was only more hardened by it, more driven to vindicate himself and the race-based (and racist) ideology that preoccupied the South for so long.  South Carolina’s Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman is a disturbing case in point.

Who is your personal favorite character in The Rebel Wife and why? Least favorite?

Augusta is my true beloved, probably not surprisingly.  But Rachel is a close second.  She was a young woman when slavery ended and relished freedom—leapt at it with both hands.  Her life’s focus became a quest for the realization of that slavery-obsessed word, “freedom”.  She is a strong woman who has fear, but as Augusta notes, will not show it to anyone.  Feeling her grow and develop as I wrote the novel, with her prophetic mysticism and moral compass, was one of the wonderful experiences of this book. 

There are plenty of characters who are unlikeable in The Rebel Wife.  Some people don’t find Augusta so likeable, which for some reason comes as such a surprise to me!  Maybe I love her flaws too much?  But I can’t say that there are any characters I did not like spending time with.  They may have been “wicked” people, but I tried to understand their side of things, so to speak.  Men today can be fatuously ignorant of the benefits of male-ness in society.  Surely 150 years ago, their superiority was a foregone conclusion—at least to them.  Judge is the wickedest person in the novel and he exercises his power in every way, in particular through race and gender.  Very, very unlikeable—and yet exploring that combination of power and bigotry was an intriguing experience.

In your future writing endeavors, what other historical events or time periods would you consider tackling for a novel? Would you consider writing outside of the historical fiction genre?

I love the historical space in Albion where I’ve spent so much time.  I definitely plan on working in that space again—right now the Great Depression in the Tennessee Valley is a particular focus.  But I love history period, and I believe that no matter what I write, whether it is a contemporary setting or not, it will have a strong element of history.  Since high school, I have loved the history of France and Western Europe, the medieval period, the renaissance and the early modern period.  I have also been reading a lot of history about the Roman Republic and Empire, which is a time of incredible drama, as many have noted before.  A perfect historical soap opera that continues to fascinate—did anyone see Madonna’s performance at the Superbowl?  A Cleopatra-scaled Roman triumph if ever there was one.

About The Rebel Wife -Set in Reconstruction Alabama, Augusta “Gus” Branson is a young widow whose quest for freedom turns into a race for her life after her husband dies of a fever and the inheritance that is her means of survival goes missing. Gus soon confronts the social stigma of her marriage; how her husband earned his fortune; the dangerous conflict between the Ku Klux Klan and the Freedman’s Bureau; and a deadly fever. As a result, she learns that nothing is as she believed and everyone she trusts is hiding something.

About Taylor M. Polites - Taylor Polites was born in Huntsville, the basis for the town of Albion in this book, and researched this novel since he was fifteen years old and volunteered to work at an historic home. Polites became obsessed with the Southern experience during the Civil War, read diaries, memoirs, and letters from the period, and imagined and mapped out the town of Albion, much like William Faulkner created his Yoknapatawpha County.

February 13, 2012 at 8:00pm - Enjoy an evening lecture at the Atlanta History Center’s midtown campus, Margaret Mitchell House, presenting author Taylor Polites and special guest Susan Rebecca White to discuss Polites’ new book, The Rebel Wife. Admission for lectures is $5 members, $10 nonmembers; reservations are required; call 404.814.4150 or reserve online.