"The Man in the Stone Cottage"

Before turning to novel writing, Stephanie Cowell was an opera singer, balladeer, founded an outdoor arts series in New York City's Bryant Park, a Renaissance festival, a chamber opera company and many other things. She has lived in New York City all her life, indeed in the same apartment building for fifty-two years in the neighborhood (and sometimes down the block) where they filmed You've Got Mail. Cowell has loved England and Europe all her life and traveled there almost every year.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Man in the Stone Cottage, and reported the following:

Page 69 is one of those important scenes in a novel which I’d call place markers or linking scenes. It is from Charlotte’s point-of-view. It is a long shot which shows us the Brontë family at a celebratory Christmas dinner such as most families have. They speak of politics, the neighbors, they gossip and exchange small gifts and eat good food. Towards the bottom of the page, Charlotte draws back a little to observe how happy they are and then ruminates how to make enough money to keep them all in the house together, well-fed and contented. It then moves from the long shot to the closeup. By the following page, she is once more making determined plans.

Actually, I think page 69 and the family dinner scene is perfect to introduce the book. The moments of happy family are what they all yearn for (though the brother Branwell will wreck his part of it) and have too seldom.

For those who do not know the story of the real little Brontë family in 1844 Victorian England, they are living in a Yorkshire parsonage of the church where the father is the curate (priest-in-charge). Though there are three sisters and one wayward brother at the table, they feel the presence of their mother and two other sisters who died as children. Charlotte as the eldest was charged to keeping them altogether. But though she will of course within three years write Jane Eyre and make more money than she ever dreamed, happy scenes like this will not often come again. Grave sickness will end these dinners. And Emily while writing Wuthering Heights. will become more remote, involved with a man in a stone cottage on the moor who no one else has ever seen.

Visit Stephanie Cowell's website.

The Page 69 Test: Claude & Camille.

--Marshal Zeringue