Q&A with Shelley Noble

 

 

 

Shelley Noble is the author of the new novel The Colony Club. Her many other novels include The Tiffany Girls. She lives in New Jersey.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Colony Club?

 

A: I had been kicking around this idea of doing a story about Bessie [Marbury] and Elsie [de Wolfe] for a while. They were fascinating characters.

 

Bessie was one of the most important theatrical agents in New York and Europe in the early 1900s. Elsie was known as “The best dressed actress on the Rialto,” as well as Bessie’s protégé and lifetime companion.

 

But I couldn’t come up with the historical or fictional hook that felt right for the story.

 

Then one day I was listening to a podcast by my colleague Alix Rickloff who mentioned using the book Ladies and Not-So-Gentle Women in her research on Daisy Harriman for Last Light Over Oslo.

 

I had used the same book for my research on Bessie and Elsie, so I revisited it and happily ran across a phrase about “Daisy’s club.” It seemed intriguing so I looked for more about this club, and found the establishment of the very real Colony Club, which still exists today. And suddenly the concept of the novel blossomed into being.

 

Q: The writer Eliza Knight called the book a “powerful reminder that when women work together, they can not only achieve great things, but smash through barriers.” What do you think of that assessment?

 

A: I absolutely agree and I’m so glad that she got that from my portrayal of the real and fictional characters and their story.

 

Over and over in history, women have embraced issues that were unrecognized, dismissed or considered off limits, and have organized to overcome obstacles to change things for the better. Change sometimes takes a village, and often a village of women.

Q: Of your three main characters, two--Daisy Harriman and Elsie de Wolfe--are historical figures, but the third, Nora Bromley, is fictional. How did you create her?

 

A: The first thing I did was study the few women architects of the period. At the time an architect, male and female, didn’t need a degree in architecture to practice. Most attached themselves to a firm and worked their way up as Stanford White did. Only a few women actually ended up practicing.

 

I knew the kind of young woman I wanted Nora to be and I wove the characteristics of her prototypes into her personality and drive.

 

Q: What do you see as the role of Stanford White in the novel?

 

A: Stanford White was the architect of the clubhouse, which was a four-storied town house that took up four city blocks on Madison Avenue. He was very much in demand at the time. And a very complicated person.

 

His scandalous lifestyle finally caught up with him and he was murdered during the building of the club. The scandal arising from the trial nearly ended the future of the club.

 

So though he was a minor player in the actual scenes of the novel, his own life impacted the club and its members in extremely challenging ways.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I just turned in The Sisters of Book Row, which takes place in 1915, along Fourth Avenue between Union Square and Astor Place, which was home to most of the secondhand and rare book stores of Manhattan.

 

Three sisters who run a rare bookshop mysteriously receive a box of lost fragments of poetry by the ancient, and banned, Greek poetess Sappho, just as the most vicious censor in American history, Anthony Comstock, unleashes his minions upon Book Row.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Just that I feel blessed to be able to bring my love of history to my readers and hopefully spark a little of that love in them too.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Shelley Noble.