Photo by Beowulf Sheehan
Kate Manning is the author of the new novel Gilded Mountain. Her other books include the novel My Notorious Life. A former documentary television producer, she lives in Manhattan.
Q: What inspired you to write Gilded Mountain?
A: A bit of family history sent me on a long odyssey. I found an old panoramic photograph from 1915 in my parents’ attic that featured a bunch of people standing in front of some mountains, wearing funny hats, like conventioneers. My dad said that one of them was probably my great-grandfather.
It was news to me that in this ancestor ran a marble quarry in the Colorado mountains, one that supplied the stone for the Lincoln Memorial and the Tomb of the Unknowns in Washington. Searching for more information, I found some dramatic stories--rich material for fiction.
Q: How did you create your character Sylvie?
A: The heroine of my previous novel, My Notorious Life, was a brash, outspoken character. For this book, I wanted a different voice, a story about a woman learning and deciding whether to challenge authority, to act on what she sees and knows.
Sylvie is a narrator who observes with sharp eyes and a rich inner life. While she is intrepid—strong and hardy in the mountains--she is otherwise cautious, because she understands that the consequences of speaking up can be severe, not only for herself, but for her family. I wanted to explore what keeps women silent, how they are schooled not to challenge the world as they find it.
I chose to make Sylvie an immigrant—a lot of stone workers in the Northeastern US immigrated from Québec—and since I love the French language, its cognates in English, I made her and her family Québécoise. I thoroughly enjoyed learning more about Franco-American culture and history.
It was interesting to see how the labor movement was excoriated by the Catholic church in Québécois communities. Their silencing of dissent created a bit of a problem at first because a “good girl” like Sylvie would have a hard time rebelling against her upbringing. She’d have to learn from other rebellious women in order to go her own way. A newspaper editor, a countess, and Mother Jones were her teachers.
Q: How did you research the novel, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: I read many books, trawled period newspaper files, researched online—especially in photo archives--and traveled to Colorado.
In Redstone, I toured the mansion of John C. Osgood and his wife, Alma Regina Shelgrem. Osgood was from Brooklyn and made a fortune running mines all over the West. Mostly coal. His mansion in Redstone is astonishing—and actually has wallpaper made from the hides of elephants he’d shot in Africa. That particular detail was too rich to leave out.
I also went to Marble, Colorado, as a kind of pilgrimage—to see where my great-grandfather had lived. While there I was lucky enough to get a tour of the astonishing quarry there.
I was surprised and moved to find evidence in a file cabinet that my dad’s father had lived there as a boy. I never met this grandfather, as he’d died when my father was young. Dad did not know much about his father’s childhood or his own grandparents. So what surprised me the most was discovering family history I’d never known.
I’ve been surprised by how much I love history, because in school, textbook history seemed to me to be a lot of boring battles, dates, reigns of kings, and presidential administrations. There were few women in it. “That’s because women never did anything important,” is what my eighth grade history teacher told me. His dismissal discouraged me from pursuing history, which made me turn to novels, where women’s stories are rich and varied.
Q: You’ve said, “I wanted to gain perspective on the 2020s by examining the 1910s.” What parallels do you see between that era and our own?
A: And I said that before the Supreme Court obliterated women’s reproductive rights (in the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade)! It’s one of many ways it seems we are being dragged back to an earlier time.
Much of our society—then, as now--is structured to favor the very wealthy. For a while we had a vibrant middle class, where a family could afford a home, a car, a vacation on a single paycheck. That middle-class life was possible thanks largely to the powerful labor movement of the early 1900s. Now, in the 2020s, union organizing is showing new signs of life—at places like Starbucks and Amazon and the restaurant and airline industries.
But there are many parallels between then and now. In the early 1900s, African Americans and immigrants feared violence from white supremacists, there were battles over press freedom, immigrant rights, and national monuments. Americans are struggling, as ever, to live up to our professed ideals of equality and liberty and justice for all.
A novel that weaves some of these issues into fiction, whether a sweeping family saga, a love story, a drama or adventure can illustrate the complexities of the past that make it seem so familiar it resonates in the present.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I only knew that Sylvie would be presented with a choice about what sort of life she wanted for herself, and that she would have to do something about the unfairness she saw all around. I wasn’t sure what it was that she could do, given her circumstances as a young woman without means or power.
Wrangling the possibilities was quite tricky—because there were a few plot lines that had to be resolved. I had to make a lot of charts, and timelines, which I dislike doing, since I don’t have a good system for keeping track.
It was a difficult book to write because there was so much I wanted to include without making the story feeling wooden or overstuffed or “meticulously researched.” You don’t want the research to show in fiction. It has to feel “organic.”
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have about six novels half-cooked--in a file drawer. The one that’s not in the drawer is another story based on the life of a real woman from the 1800s. The working title is The Book of Miracles. The heroine will be involved in an escape, a chase, a reckoning with a husband. It has children in it, and a complicated but, I hope, likable? bad guy.
I have been working on it since before Gilded Mountain—it’s a much more self-contained story, and I am hoping it won’t take me nearly as long.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: It’s strange to write tales from history and live in a time when political forces seem to want return to some of the worse aspects of the past. Now we see rights we thought we had won taken from us—voting rights, reproductive rights, rights to safety in our own communities and schools.
But studying the past offers perspective. Looking at the past through the eyes of ordinary people who lived through shattering events, who fought—or didn’t—helps us to understand how we arrived at this confounding present. The arc of history is long—but doesn’t always bend toward justice. Sometimes, it has to be bent--by hard work and organizing. Stories help us see nuance, and bring the past alive.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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