It's so exciting when a book catches traction you didn't even expect (or completely did expect!), and so frustrating when a book never quite catches the traction you know it deserves. But either way it doesn't change the book, it doesn't change how much I love that book, or how thrilled I am to be publishing it.

Margaret Cavendish was one of the people who came up in the course. That was when I started thinking about her as a character for a book, but my idea was for a totally different book. It had all these characters in it; Samuel Pepys was one of the main characters. He famously wrote these extensive diaries through the period that are really funny and sort of saucy, actually.

I had all these sparkles I'd collected and wanted to work in, but when I originally started writing it and it was originally this novel about all these people set in 1666, what I was so interested in was the New Science.

The reason the middle section switches to third person is, well, this is middle age. This is the part in her life where she loses track of something that was driving her and has to figure out what's going to drive the next part of her mission, this mission to be an author. I had to push back away from her for a while before we could come up to that really lyrical close third in the final section.

I was trying to focus on Margaret's trajectory as an artist, as a woman and an artist. Hopefully Cavendish experts won't be angry at me for anything I've left out. I feel like all the major movements of her life are there.

I was obsessed with the scientific instruments people were building and all the weird experiments they were doing. I did actually wind up working in some of that, but there were whole sections I'd written about these instruments that ultimately had to be abandoned when I realized that the book really was about Margaret Cavendish. I couldn't justify using all of them.

I would be researching seventeenth-century garden design or I would be doing something with Pepys, but I just kept using all of it to write about Margaret Cavendish. It took me a long time to realize that I just wanted to write a book about her. Years.