The Globe and Mail
Stacy Lee Kong
Published April 9, 2021
Handout
They may deal in different eras – Janie Chang’s books are set in China before the First World War, while Kate Quinn has written about ancient Rome, Renaissance Italy and early 1900s France and England – but both authors take inspiration from what women were doing at various points in history. It’s an impulse that feels firmly grounded in our current moment – as critic Megan O’Grady argued in The New York Times’ T Magazine, “literary authors are increasingly looking back, not to comfort us with a sense of known past, or even an easy allegory of the present, but instead – motivated by a kind of clue-gathering – to seek reasons for why we are the way we are and how we got here, and at what point the train began to derail.”