Rachel Kadish

I often begin writing when something is bothering me. Years ago, I was thinking about Virginia Woolf’s question: what if Shakespeare had had an equally talented sister? Woolf’s answer: She died without writing a word.What, I wondered, would it take for a woman of that era, with that kind of capacious intelligence, not to die without writing a word?For one thing, she’d have to be a genius at breaking rules.My novel The Weight of Ink reaches back in time to ask the question: what does it take for a woman not to be defeated when everything around her is telling her to sit down and mind her manners? I started writing with two characters in mind, both women who don’t mind their manners: a contemporary historian named Helen Watt and a seventeenth century Inquisition refugee named Ester Velasquez. It’s been a delight working on their story. The Weight of Ink is my third novel, but I’ve also written two other novels and one novella, plus a few dozen essays and stories. Whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction, I put words to paper because it's my way of metabolizing life. To paraphrase Henry James: I don't really know what I think until I see what I say. Thanks for visiting this page, and for your interest in books.