Home
Madame Zee
"His smile is so genuine, his eyes so blue, that when he looks away she instantly feels the loss, as if he has taken back something she just now learned she needs."
You could search the English language for months and still not come up with a phrase any more succinct and perfect than this one, describing the meeting between Brother X11 and the woman who came to name herself Madame Zee.
Pearl Luke, who has called Salt Spring Island home for four years, has already won a hefty award for her first book, Breaking Ground, and Madame Zee is sure to follow in its path. You just know that a writer who spends five years writing and researching her work is in love with her craft. As she puts it:
...";I wouldn't say I'm a perfectionist, but I labour over it, and I do strive for accuracy and precision in detail and language, so I tend to layer the word until I am happy with how it reads, both silently and orally.";
Her efforts to be accurate drove her to pore over documents to discover which plants grew in English meadows, which dolls were available in the 1890s, what children's diseases then flourished, and what names were commonly given to children. She also honed up on the Theosophical Society and its founder, Madame Blavatsky, researched spiritualism and the paranormal and discovered that for almost every page she wanted to write, some investigation was required.
"At times I thought I would never finish this book..Larger concepts required weeks and months of research...";
Although the author stuck to facts when possible, she was free to flesh out her own Madame Zee who was born in England and christened Mabel Rowbotham. Zee's life has always been obscured by the far greater notoriety of her lover, the hypnotic Brother X11, the cult founder of the Aquarian Foundation on Vancouver Island and later Valdes and De Courcy Islands in the 1920s. This enigmatic woman, who followed her parents from England to the Canadian prairies in her twenties, changed her name when she began to 'come out' as a psychic ten years later, while living with wealthy friends who encouraged her abilities and research.
Luke says one of her main goals was to create a sympathetic character:
"... I consider Mabel/Zee courageous in her own way because she did not marry the staid farmer next door and "settle"; for an existence that didn't interest her...When she did marry, it was to someone who sparked her body and her imagination..she was not victimized, but rather took control, however limited, however poor her choices. ... I am unfamiliar with any life that does not include ambivalence and agonizing, and I wanted her to feel "real"; in that sense.";
Ergo the reader meets a very different Madame Zee from the cruel and brutal 'foreman' of common lore whom everyone supposedly feared:
"... My research allows me to believe that while she could have been an opportunist with a vile temper, there is not much evidence to prove anything, and given the resentment and chauvinistic thinking surrounding her, she may also have had her reputation tarnished unfairly.";
In seeking to reinvent Zee, the author is also sensitive to the fact that she is dealing with people who really lived:
"I did think about how my portrayal of Zee might affect any loved ones she may have left behind. That's part of the reason why I chose to characterize her in a more positive light, and not to use the real names of some of the colonists, but ultimately, I am writing fiction, so while I have made every attempt to be as historically accurate as possible in terms of background, the character of Zee is just that-a character. An interesting one, I hope. "
You could search the English language for months and still not come up with a phrase any more succinct and perfect than this one, describing the meeting between Brother X11 and the woman who came to name herself Madame Zee.
Pearl Luke, who has called Salt Spring Island home for four years, has already won a hefty award for her first book, Breaking Ground, and Madame Zee is sure to follow in its path. You just know that a writer who spends five years writing and researching her work is in love with her craft. As she puts it:
...";I wouldn't say I'm a perfectionist, but I labour over it, and I do strive for accuracy and precision in detail and language, so I tend to layer the word until I am happy with how it reads, both silently and orally.";
Her efforts to be accurate drove her to pore over documents to discover which plants grew in English meadows, which dolls were available in the 1890s, what children's diseases then flourished, and what names were commonly given to children. She also honed up on the Theosophical Society and its founder, Madame Blavatsky, researched spiritualism and the paranormal and discovered that for almost every page she wanted to write, some investigation was required.
"At times I thought I would never finish this book..Larger concepts required weeks and months of research...";
Although the author stuck to facts when possible, she was free to flesh out her own Madame Zee who was born in England and christened Mabel Rowbotham. Zee's life has always been obscured by the far greater notoriety of her lover, the hypnotic Brother X11, the cult founder of the Aquarian Foundation on Vancouver Island and later Valdes and De Courcy Islands in the 1920s. This enigmatic woman, who followed her parents from England to the Canadian prairies in her twenties, changed her name when she began to 'come out' as a psychic ten years later, while living with wealthy friends who encouraged her abilities and research.
Luke says one of her main goals was to create a sympathetic character:
"... I consider Mabel/Zee courageous in her own way because she did not marry the staid farmer next door and "settle"; for an existence that didn't interest her...When she did marry, it was to someone who sparked her body and her imagination..she was not victimized, but rather took control, however limited, however poor her choices. ... I am unfamiliar with any life that does not include ambivalence and agonizing, and I wanted her to feel "real"; in that sense.";
Ergo the reader meets a very different Madame Zee from the cruel and brutal 'foreman' of common lore whom everyone supposedly feared:
"... My research allows me to believe that while she could have been an opportunist with a vile temper, there is not much evidence to prove anything, and given the resentment and chauvinistic thinking surrounding her, she may also have had her reputation tarnished unfairly.";
In seeking to reinvent Zee, the author is also sensitive to the fact that she is dealing with people who really lived:
"I did think about how my portrayal of Zee might affect any loved ones she may have left behind. That's part of the reason why I chose to characterize her in a more positive light, and not to use the real names of some of the colonists, but ultimately, I am writing fiction, so while I have made every attempt to be as historically accurate as possible in terms of background, the character of Zee is just that-a character. An interesting one, I hope. "
Submitted on May 31, 2006 in By David.
