Courageous Women, Dangerous Ideas in Book of Forbidden Words by Louise Fein

Send us Fan Mail My guest today is Louise Fein, author of Book of Forbidden Words, listed in the Literature category on Art In Fiction.  Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/XGECvUgXmO0 - Premise for the novel: in Tudor England and 1550s Paris, a coded manuscript holds ideas dangerous enough to get its author burned at the stake, and in 1952, a former Bletchley Park codebreaker stuck in McCarthy-era suburbia is handed that manuscript and asked to crack it. - Why Louise went looking for a historical moment when a new technology spread ideas faster than anyone could control, and how the real Voynich manuscript, a 200-page illustrated book still locked away at Yale's Beinecke Library, turned out to be "such a gift to a novelist." - Who wrote the Voynich? The wild imagined plants and pregnant women lounging in pools that have people convinced women wrote it, and why Louise had to invent the contents of her own version. - Lysbette, Thomas More's ward: Utopia, Henry VIII's Great Matter, and the rabbit hole of what happened to nuns after the dissolution of the monasteries, plus the case for the convent being a better career move than a husband and ten kids. - Charlotte Guillard, the real Paris printer: six presses, a lawsuit against the Paper Guild over terrible paper (which may be why so few of her books survive), work for Erasmus, and a heretic hunter named Antoine de Mouchy operating literally feet from her shop. - Milly and the women of Bletchley Park: wartime codebreakers sent back to the kitchen and forbidden to speak about their work until 1974, and Levittown, the postwar "modern utopia" Louise visited for research. - The Minute Women: a semi-underground group of 1950s housewives who claimed to be raising money for charity while hunting communists and getting librarians and teachers fired. - Building a code that actually works: weeks spent on medieval cipher practices, a sundial device that holds the key, and the fact that readers can check her math in the book. - Why the Voynich still hasn't been cracked, even by AI. - Reading from Book of Forbidden Words: the prologue, Paris, July 1552, featuring a moonlit graveyard, the Pont Notre-Dame, and a manuscript somebody badly wants hidden. - A book written before the last US election: book bans, women's rights going backwards as well as forwards, and Louise's reminder to keep using our voices. - Writing three timelines without losing your mind: why Louise wrote the entire 1500s storyline first and the 1950s storyline separately, and her discovery that with three main characters, every single word matters. - Advice for historical novelists: do the research, then set it aside for the first draft, because the story is what readers came for. - What's next: a novel coming in fall 2027 about a chocolate maker and his wife who emigrate to Boston after the Irish famine, sparked by a chocolate-free January that went about as well as you'd expect. Read more from Louise Fein at https://www.louisefein.com/ Support the show Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists.  Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction. Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other. Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including *The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire,* and *The Choir.* Check out her website...