Author Mary Robinette Kowal’s ‘Of Noble Family’ tackles issues of family relationships, slavery

As Mary Robinette Kowal was writing “Of Noble Family” (Tor Books, $26.99), the fifth and concluding book in her Glamourist Histories fantasy series, finding a realistic ending proved challenging.

“The novel in outline form had four or five different endings before I hit the one that I finally delivered,” Kowal said. “A lot of it was making sure that it made logical sense and was emotionally satisfying.”

The Glamourist Histories are set in the Regency era, and the first book, “Shades of Milk and Honey,” was published as a stand-alone novel set in England and borrows themes from Jane Austen’s novels, including “Pride and Prejudice.”

In the series, glamour is a form of magic that can be used to create illusions of light, sound or scent. Though it can be worked by men or women, it’s considered a woman’s art, like music or painting.

“As a writer, coming up with rules that did not break history was a lot of fun. Sometimes frustrating, but a lot of fun,” said Kowal, a recipient of the Hugo Award and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. “What I like about glamour as an art form is the way it combines the physicality of the glamourist with the illusion that they are creating. My vision of what a glamourist looks like when they are working is very much like watching someone doing taekwondo, but they are creating pictures while they are doing it.”

The novels after “Shades of Milk and Honey” have the main characters, glamourists Jane and Vincent, traveling to Belgium and Italy and back to London.

“What I was interested in with the sequels was basically exploring the evolution of the relationship,” Kowal said. “Jane Austen didn’t write sequels. So immediately that told me that my second book was not going to be a Jane Austen pastiche. But my characters are born in a Jane Austen drawing room, so there is still very much that flavor. So what I tried to do then was look at things that affected them as individuals and their relationship.”

While Kowal describes the first novel as a Regency love story, she said the second one, “Glamour and Glass,” is “a war/spy novel disguised as a Regency romance.” She described the third book, “Without a Summer,” as “a political/courtroom drama disguised as a Regency romance,” and the fourth, “Valour and Vanity,” as being similar to a heist novel.

“Of Noble Family” was released April 28, and Kowal calls it a “grimdark” with darker, more serious themes, including slavery.

“Every day things get worse,” Kowal said. “That turns into Regency grimdark.”

In “Of Noble Family,” Vincent receives word that his estranged father has passed away in the West Indies and a family member must go help set the affairs in order — including retrieving a new will. Vincent’s older brother is injured and unable to travel, so Jane and Vincent sail to the island of Antigua for what they hope is a quick trip.

They find that Vincent’s father’s manipulations are far from finished, and they are appalled at the disarray of the plantation and the treatment of the slaves. Their attempts to either escape or help the situation leave them with fewer options.

Jane is also pregnant and unable to work glamour as she tries to avoid having another miscarriage.

Kowal said weaving the web of troubles the couple tries to escape was the easy part of writing the novel.

“Every action your character takes is based on a question: ‘How do I get out of this?’ And when you look at that, does that action succeed? Yes, it succeeds, but things are worse, and there is a consequence to that. Or no, it doesn’t succeed, and there are consequences to the behavior,” she said.

The ending is what gave her trouble.

“What I wanted to avoid was the trope of ‘white man saves the day,’” Kowal said. A slave revolt wouldn’t have worked, she said, because of the 40 naval ports on the island. She also wanted to keep Jane and Vincent as protagonists but not have them abolish slavery.

Kowal said that while Austen’s contemporaries would have noticed Austen’s references to slavery, those references may not be obvious to modern readers. In “Emma,” a character has a background as a merchant in Bristol, which was a slave trade port, and in “Mansfield Park,” a character comments about giving up sugar — a practice of abolitionists because sugar was a product of plantations — and Sir Thomas goes to check on his property in Antigua.

“There is this stuff all the way through it,” Kowal said. “What I wanted to do was to deal with the same issues Austen was dealing with but in a way that’s understandable to a modern reader.”

In addition to slavery, she includes racial issues such as how a person’s standing in society was determined if their father was white and their mother was a slave.

“Of Noble Family” is darker and, at 576 pages, longer than the other novels in the series. The language is clean, but there is some generally described violence as well as allusions to sexual relationships, mainly regarding parentage.

It’s an intriguing novel that delves into tough topics and deftly handles them, and Kowal's ending nicely wraps up the book and series.

While each of the novels can be read as a stand-alone novel, several references in “Of Noble Family” would be better understood if one has read “Without a Summer” first.

Kowal said she starts with broad research when she is developing a plot.

“Then I do specific research to make sure I didn’t plot myself in a hole,” she said. “I try to find someone local who can help me spot problems, and I’ll let them do a read for cultural blind spots.”

For “Of Noble Family,” she worked with an Antiguan writer to help with the native dialect. That writer also pointed out that a description of a sunset was inaccurate.

Kowal also visited Venice and London for research, used online map tools and read travel diaries written in the novel's time period.

While she says she has finished with her world of the glamourists for now, Kowal, who is also a voice artist and puppeteer, is working on two other historical novels with fantasy twists, one set during World War II and the other in the Civil War.

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