Anita Shreve

ANITA SHREVE

Anita Shreve unveils a turn-of-the-century tale of romantic obsession and possession

April 2003

"The pull of history has been a strong theme in my life as a novelist," writes Anita Shreve in a recent online essay. The author visited 1929 in last year's Sea Glass and 1899 for 2000's Fortune's Rocks. She returns to the past in her latest, All He Ever Wanted.

"At the turn of every century there is that primitive fear that the world is going to end," she explained in an interview. Appropriately, All He Ever Wanted begins in winter 1899 with a chaotic fire in a New Hampshire hotel. The disastrous evening introduces young Etna Bliss to Nicholas Van Tassel, a haughty college professor immediately compelled to make Etna his wife. Faced with few options, Etna reluctantly yields to her zealous suitor, settling in for a lifetime as the trapped object of Nicholas' obsessive love. Told from the often scheming perspective of Nicholas, the saga is "Full-bodied storytelling with an unflinching moral backbone: one of Shreve's best," according to Kirkus Reviews.

"A novel is a collision of ideas," Shreve recently explained on her publisher's website. "Three or four threads may be floating around in the writer's consciousness, and at a single moment in time, these ideas collide and produce a novel." In the case of her newest work, the author was struck with a lush vision of "a calm and peaceful room of bleached quiet." In the center of the imagined room, beneath an ornate, oversized white chandelier, sits a woman, who serenely sews, reads, writes and sips tea.

"No one knew about the room, and she had gone to great pains to achieve it," Shreve recently wrote, "Indeed, one could say she had bartered away her life to have it. Why was it so important to her?"

Taking this scenario of the lady beneath the white chandelier to the next level, Shreve envisioned "the man who loved her, who was obsessed with her, and would have done anything for her short of letting her have her independence and this room. And why was that? Voila! I had a plot."

Although Shreve enjoyed big-time mainstream exposure in 1998, the year in which her novel The Pilot's Wife was selected for Oprah's Book Club, she's been writing and publishing for decades. As a high school teacher in the early 1970s, she began writing fiction in her spare time. Accolades came quickly, when one of her first published stories, "Past the Island, Drifting," received an O. Henry Prize in 1975. Yet Shreve didn't think she could support herself via fiction, and embarked instead on a career in journalism, living and writing for three years in Kenya, Africa.

Returning home, she freelanced for a variety of magazines as she raised her children. She eventually parlayed two articles published in the New York Times Magazine into Remaking Motherhood and Women Together, Women Alone, two non-fiction books. By 1989, she published her first novel, Eden Close, and has been writing fiction-writing full time ever since. She now splits her time between Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

As a one-time writing professor at Amherst College, Shreve offered pragmatic advice for her students: "I wanted them to learn how to make a very good chair, as in learn the craft of writing. I'm not interested in the 'artiste' aspect of writing. They should be able to write and shape a story even if it's only four pages long."