Author Talk: Francine Prose, “Five Weeks in the Country”, with Roxana Robinson

A special evening with Francine Prose, author of Five Weeks in the Country, which brilliantly imagines a true encounter between Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen in a story of strange friendship.  Prose will be in conversation with novelist and biographer Roxana Robinson.

Five Weeks in the Country, a work of imaginative fiction inspired by actual events, is Francine Prose at her dazzling best.

From the acclaimed, award-winning author of Reading Like a Writer and Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, comes an utterly original novel inspired by the strange friendship between Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen and set during the summer when Dickens’s family life exploded.

In the summer of 1857, when British newspapers warned of an approaching comet about to destroy the earth, an unusual-looking stranger arrived at Charles Dickens’s home, Gad’s Hill, in the countryside outside London. Dickens had met Hans Christian Andersen at a dinner party a decade before and, in a moment of desperation, had invited him to visit.

The visit did not go well. The eccentric Danish author of classic fairy tales, who barely spoke English, outstayed his welcome by many weeks and alienated the Dickens household, which included nine children. Even the oblivious, obsessively self-conscious Andersen sensed the increasing tension between Dickens and his unhappy wife, Catherine, but was slow to understand—or to believe—that Dickens had fallen in love with a young actress appearing in his new play.

For Andersen, those five weeks were a series of social mistakes and embarrassments, but ultimately a lesson in how life’s most humbling experiences can be transformed into art.

Prose is a distinguished, award-winning American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic, the author of twenty novels and much nonfiction. A review of her recent memoir 1974 justly calls Prose “one of the great overachievers of her era.” She is a visiting professor at Bard College, a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, and formerly president of PEN American Center. She has received Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NYPL Cullman Center. Her novel Blue Angel (2000) was a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2010, she received the Washington University International Humanities Medal. She has even had a novel adapted as a Broadway musical.

Books will be available for sale and signing. Registration is required.