It's all just so fraught when you're writing and then going through the editorial process. It feels like this shape-shifting thing. When it's done, and you can't change a single word, it's a totally different thing. I was surprised by what that thing was.

I was sad to see some of them go. Like a magic lantern that would project images on walls and people would travel the countryside with these magic lanterns and tell stories. And there was this cabinet that you would walk up to and it had a little peephole and inside the whole thing was covered in thousands of little mirrors.

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.

So it was this multi-perspective, multi-character book, and it went through all of these different manifestations. I'm not sure there was a single moment where I thought to myself, Oh, I need to write about Margaret Cavendish. She just kept taking over the book I thought I was writing.

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.

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.

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.