Mary Novik was born in Victoria where she grew up reading voraciously from the books that the bookmobile brought to her home on Gordon Head Road. After her family moved to Vancouver, she attended university, was “blown away by DH Lawrence and poets like John Donne” and met and married the young man who is still her husband. She lives in Vancouver, close to their son and their grandson.
After teaching for many years at Langara College in Vancouver, Novik realized that if she was ever going to write a novel, she “had better get started.” She was inspired to begin by the Chapters Competition for debut novels. The result, Bracelet of Bright Hair was one of the five books short-listed out of the 400 unpublished entries.
Encouraged, Novik decided to write a second novel that would make it to the top, but part way through, her focus flagging and in need of support, she signed up for a mentorship program at Booming Ground with Thomas Wharton. There, she met the future members of SPIN, the writing support group that was formed and that is still going strong.
The completion of her stunning novel, Conceit is the result of that productive environment.
Conceit has been called “a magnificent novel of 17th century London” by the Globe and Mail and “the book that critics have been drooling over” by The Ottawa Citizen. Conceit won the Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction and was long-listed for the Giller Prize. It has recently been selected as a Top Ten Hottest Book of 2008.
Conceit tells the story of John Donnes’s daughter, Pegge, who is a rebellious girl, barely in her teens and “already too clever for a world that values learning only in men.” The novel is set in the teeming, bawdy streets of Restoration London and opens with a gripping scene of the 1668 Fire of London. Exquisitely written, Conceit is seductive, elegant, and enormously satisfying.
Find out more about Mary Novik by visiting her excellent website:
My novel Conceit began with a happy accident. Browsing in
a bookshop in England, I chanced upon an erotic poem by
John Donne that really intrigued me. Had he written it to the
teenaged Ann More? I knew he had eloped with her and then
complained, "John Donne. Ann Donne. Undone." I sought out
his effigy in St Paul's Cathedral and stared at the smug grin
carved into marble. What had happened between that
passionate love affair and his death? I learned that Donne's
effigy was the only one that survived the Great Fire of 1666.
That night, I dreamt that his daughter Pegge was rescuing the
effigy from the fire storm in Paul's. That sparked the opening
scene of Conceit. Writing it, I looked for witnesses and found
that Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, and others had written
dramatic accounts of the fire in their diaries.
