C.J. Carey is the pen name of Jane Thynne, author of a number of books including the Clara Vine series. She was born in Venezuela, went to school in London and then to Oxford University where she read English. After that she worked as a BBC journalist, before moving to Fleet Street and working at The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Independent, as well as numerous magazines. She lives in London. Widowland is the first novel she has written as C.J. Carey.
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Much of Widowland centers on this idea of rewriting great works of literature. I've heard of burning books, but not rewriting them. Was this an idea you invented, or has this actually occurred?
I've written several novels set in and around wartime Europe and Nazi Germany, and in researching those, I came across something that absolutely astonished me: in the 1930s and going into World War II, there was a man called Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi functionary very close to Hitler, who was an obsessive pedagogue. He set up an SS task force to go through occupied Europe to seize books from libraries and personal collections, then bring them back to Berlin, where a team of scholars would rewrite these history books. The idea of actually rewriting history so painstakingly was so astonishing to me that I took an imaginative leap and I thought, what would it be like if you had a situation where somebody had to rewrite English literature to make it ideologically appropriate for Nazi ideology?
And then when my husband died, I was out to lunch with an old friend who made a passing comment that he'd love to invite me to dinner, but that they only had couples to dinner, and I thought to myself, "I'm living in widowland now," which...
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