Winner of 2021 SCN’s Sarton Historical Fiction Award
Kathleen Williams Renk says her goal as a writer is to bring the stories of women to life, especially stories that haven’t been told. And since her second book, Vindicated: A Life of Mary Shelley, won the Sarton Award for historical fiction, it would seem her goal has been met.
Kathleen says women’s stories inspire her, and that she often gets ideas from scraps of history. “While in graduate school, I read William Godwin’s memoir of his wife, the philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, who was Mary Shelley’s mother and the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) that advocated for equal education for women and argued against treating women as decorative dolls for male amusement. “As a nurse, I was most disturbed by the fact that Mary Wollstonecraft died of a retained placenta … and that notable London physicians brought puppies into her confinement room to nurse Mary Wollstonecraft’s breasts. This was the scrap of history that stayed with me for many years, and which inspired Vindicated.”
The author initially wanted to write about Wollstonecraft but eventually decided to focus on her daughter, Mary, who despite a heartbreaking life that included the loss of four of her five children, still managed to write eight novels, including the well-known Frankenstein. “Mary Shelley lived by her pen and, in my view, became the woman that her mother hoped educated women could become. She became an intellectual and a creative philosopher. In my view, her ghostly mother guided her along the way.”
The fodder for Kathleen’s first book, Orphan Annie’s Sister, was her own mother, who grew up in a Catholic orphanage run by German nuns “who brought the children up to their station in life, which meant training them to be servants or laborers.” The author’s paternal grandfather died when her father was only two years old and then was abandoned by his mother. Despite their early hardships, both her parents became “amazing, generous, loving people who cared for neighbors and strangers alike.”
“When I was a child, my dad was transferred to Des Moines, Iowa, where I attended Catholic school for twelve years and graduated from an all-girls Catholic high school that, like the orphanage where my mom grew up, was supervised by strict nuns.” Even so, Kathleen says some of them were excellent, intellectual role models. She also was lucky enough to live next-door to a well-traveled woman who graduated from Wellesley College in the 1930s and was another great role model. Kathleen earned a bachelor’s degree in religion and philosophy from the University of Northern Iowa in 1975, then obtained her nursing degree from the University of Iowa.
“At this point, I married an adventurous and brilliant hippie who pursued a career in computer science while I practiced nursing,” she recalls. While raising three children, Kathleen worked as a nurse for twelve years before going on to earn a doctorate in English in 1995 and serving as an English professor at Northern Illinois University until her retirement in 2018. She then began to focus more on her personal writing.
“I never aspired to become a writer but, along the way, I became one,” she says, first by writing three scholarly books and many academic articles. She was also helped along this path by becoming a member of Creative Girls (the oldest women’s writing group in Iowa City) and by studying fiction writing with James Alan MacPherson, an Iowa Writers Workshop professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
Kathleen doesn’t believe in the adage that you should only write about that which you personally know. “With research,” she claims, “you can write about anything. But I do believe that we should write about what we wish to learn. And as women, we should write on behalf of women like my grandmother, who never had a chance to write her own story. I don’t even know if my grandmother was literate, but I do know that she worked herself to death and didn’t have the time or opportunity to reflect on her life or to learn about other women’s lives throughout time. So I write to give voice to women whose stories have not been completely told. I’m particularly interested in writing about women authors, artists, and heroes.”
“Winning the Sarton Award is a tremendous honor,” Kathleen says, “since I have admired Sarton’s elegant and profound work since graduate school. It also makes me feel quite validated as a creative writer.”
However, she hasn’t been sitting around since Vindicated was published. The author just signed a contract with an independent press in California to publish a novel, In an Artist’s Studio, about the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, with the focus on the lives of the poet/artist/model Elizabeth Siddal and her sister-in-law, the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti. “I’m thrilled that my readers will learn about Lizzie and Christina’s struggles to be taken seriously as artists. I’m also happy to be able to share the alternative history that I’ve written for them.”
Kathleen is also revising a novel called No Coward’s Soul Have I, which centers on an imagined meeting in 1812 between the idealistic and revolutionary Percy Shelley and the Irish heroine Anne Devlin, who was confined in Dublin’s notorious Kilmainham Jail for three years. “Editors have offered encouragement and I’m still looking for the best press or agent for this project,” she says.
In addition, Kathleen has recently returned to singing, which was her first love, and playing the violin and guitar. “And now that I’ve moved to Colorado, I’ve become a hiker and have met fabulous new friends in Boulder County, where people try to be and seem to succeed at being super-agers.”
Her advice to younger writers, meanwhile, is “never give up.”
Kathleen Williams Renk taught British and Women’s literature for nearly three decades in the U.S. and abroad. Her scholarly books include Magic, Science, and Empire in Postcolonial Literature: The Alchemical Literary Imagination (2012), and Women Writing the Neo-Victorian Novel: Erotic “Victorians” (2020). Renk studied fiction writing at the University of Iowa with the Pulitzer-Prize winning author James Alan MacPherson. Her short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Iowa City Magazine, Literary Yard, Page and Spine, and CC & D Magazine. Vindicated is her first novel.
