History, Sex in Alum's Novel

When Jenny Davidson ’93 talks about which Harvard experiences helped prepare her to write Heredity, her first novel, one thing is clear: her expository writing class wasn’t one of them.

“That was exactly the type of class I hated,” Davidson said before a reading of sections of her book at Wordsworth Books in Cambridge last week.

Davidson is now an associate professor of English and literature at Columbia University.

Heredity tells the story of Elizabeth Mann, a young woman working in London on a travel guide assignment, who discovers the skeleton of Jonathan Wild, a famous 18th century criminal, in an obscure museum. With the help of her lover, an infertility specialist, Elizabeth and the reader become engrossed in Wild’s mysterious life. Eventually, Elizabeth decides to take steps to bring the man closer to modernity that anyone ever thought possible.

The book was labeled as being about “sex-and-death with a side-order of extra death” by Bruno Maddox, an author and friend of Davidson’s. She laughs when she hears that line.

“Only as I was re-reading it did I realize how much sex there really is,” she says.

The novel has been a project ten years in the making.

Although Davidson says she always knew she wanted to write historical fiction, her interest really began in the summer of 1993 when she had been doing some research on 18th century literature at Widener.

“I was looking for some exciting character to base [my book] on,” she says.

That same summer, Davidson worked for the London edition of Let’s Go.

“Elizabeth is actually based on a Let’s Go writer,” she says. “Like her, I was a rather irresponsible researcher.”

It was during her travels in London that Davidson first heard about Jonathan Wild, am actual historical figure.

“The hinge [of the book] is that this guy’s skeleton is actually still on display in a museum in London,” she says.

Looking back at her Harvard experience, Davidson, who was a literature concentrator in Adams House, points to a seminar by former Mellon Professor of Social Sciences Simon Schama as the course that turned writing around for her.

“I really loved the academic stuff, but I couldn’t find a creative writing class that was a good fit. They were so much less intellectual than the English and lit classes I was taking,” she says.

Schama’s class, called “Writing Narrative History,” was the perfect combination for her, she says. Half the time was devoted to closely reading historical narratives, and the other half was a writing workshop.

“It was the first time I actually had a model of writing that fit with the idea of what I wanted to write,” Davidson says. Davidson started work on her novel after graduation, though it would be another six years until it took a form similar to the version that appears in print.

“I must have written well over a thousand pages,” she says.

The book is now about three hundred pages.

She says she felt that the various permutations were necessary to finally achieve what she wanted.

“I think it’s kind of exciting to look at a big pile of pages that you wrote and then throw it out,” she says.   At the same time, Davidson was working on her dissertation on 18th century hypocrisy “and why people wanted to argue that it was a good thing.”

But she stresses that the novel is not something she did in her spare time, because it makes it sound like less work than it actually was.

“I hate the idea of calling this a hobby,” she says. The book is being published by Soft Skull Press, which specializes, according to its website, in “fearless, progressive, independently minded literature.”

Davidson is friendly with one of the publishers of the company, as she was with most of the people at the Wordsworth reading. The reading was so relaxed that Wordsworth events director Jim Behrle said, “I haven’t ever had an author laugh at their own introduction.”Davidson says she’s thrilled with the book’s reception, and she attributes her success to a combination of perseverance and luck. Her advice to other writers?

“For most, it’s going to take a long time, but it’s worth sticking it out,” she says.