Guest post by Laurel Corona, author of FINDING EMILIE

Laurel Corona (THE FOUR SEASONS, PENELOPE'S DAUGHTER) has become well-recognized for her vivid fiction about women and the forgotten or undervalued roles they played in their societies; in her new novel FINDING EMILIE, released on April 12, she offers us the evocative and poignant story of Lili du Chatelet, daughter of the free-thinking Emilie du Chatelet, who liveds in the crumbling world of pre-revolutionary France. Abandoned as a baby, Lili seeks to uncover the startling legacy of her mother, as life in aristocratic society constricts around her like the excruciating corsets she is forced to wear. But she is soon compelled to discover much more than where she comes from and gain the courage to fashion her on life as the world around her undergoes cataclysmic upheaval.

In celebration of FINDING EMILIE's release, Laurel has offered us this guest post. Please join me in welcoming Laurel Corona. Voltaire: Bad Boy of the Enlightenmentby Laurel Corona "The ungodly arch-villain has died like a dog,” Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is reputed to have said upon hearing of Voltaire’s death in Paris in 1778. Undoubtedly, similar sentiments were expressed over much of France at the news. Voltaire’s death was consistent with his life. Toothless and bald, the octogenarian hypochondriac had finally caught a real illness, and he used his little remaining strength to turn his back on a priest who had come to hear his confession and give him communion. “Just let me die in peace,” he growled. Those were his last words. Peace was not something Voltaire had offered the church in return--or any of the entrenched institutions in France.

With his passionate convictions about intellectual and political honesty and social justice, Voltaire’s acid wit cut a wide swath, sparing no one he considered a hypocrite or liar. Poet, historian, playwright, philosopher, essayist, and satirist, Voltaire used his prodigious talent to combat what he called “l’infame”--the infamy of using a position of authority to take advantage of others. The church lied and abused power to instill fear, the state to foster obedience. No one, it seemed, in Voltaire’s words, “dared to think.” Think for yourself. That’s all Voltaire asked, but whenever he thought for himself he could count on trouble.

He was imprisoned a number of times for problems with the censors, was banished to England, and later was sequestered for fifteen years under loose house arrest at the home of the Marquis du Châtelet, Voltaire’s lover Emilie du Châtelet’s tolerant husband. Throughout his life numerous lettres de cachet, arrest warrants granted as royal favors, were taken out against him by powerful individuals with a grudge. With what amounted to a bull’s eye painted on his back and arrows in the hands of most of the powerful forces in France, after Emilie’s death he lived out his life as a landed gentleman in Ferney, close enough to the Swiss border to escape on horseback at a moment’s notice. He was on that horse more than once. His books were routinely published abroad and smuggled into France, while Voltaire threw up his hands as if this were beyond his control. It was his popularity with a restive public that brought the books to France, not he himself--or so he would have it. Those books include his Philosophical Dictionary, an alphabetized collection of essays skewering one or another pretension. Church teachings were his primary target, but he also took aim at the monarchy and government, and at common people who ought to know better than to believe anything authorities say.

My favorite entry is the one on Adam, where Voltaire pretends not to understand how Adam could be the father of all humankind and yet no one in China seems to have heard of him. Not heard of their original forefather? Voltaire suggests that it must have been a very effective campaign indeed to have so thoroughly destroyed all the monuments that must once have been erected to him, and all the writings other than the Bible that told the same story. Fellow philosophers did not escape his pen, the most notable being Leibniz, whose philosophy of optimism is dismantled by the adventures of Voltaire’s most famous character, Candide. Anecdotes about Voltaire reveal that he practiced in his life the same disdain for authority and illogic.

Stories abound, such as the one Voltaire recounts to my protagonist, Lili, in Finding Emilie. He tells her he once told a police officer searching his room for contraband writing, that he threw the materials down the privy. The officer probed the excrement-filled privy with such enthusiasm that sewage ended up spraying the tavern downstairs when a pipe burst. Voltaire never discarded any papers at all. He just wanted a fit punishment for someone who did not dare to think, and who made his living enforcing censorship laws. Voltaire was rich, having gotten his initial wealth from a successful strategy to manipulate a glitch in the French lottery and win the grand prize.

By the time he needed a new retreat near the Swiss border, he had enough money to purchase not just the chateau at Ferney but the entire town. The tiny town’s church spoiled the view from the chateau, so Voltaire tore it down without church permission, intending to build another in a new location. The church went on the attack, demanding he rebuild on the hallowed ground where it once stood. Voltaire had no choice but to go along. A Deist, he believed that God created and ran the universe through natural law, and that the church distorted that reality through ludicrous doctrines and stories. Above the new church door Voltaire had a different kind of dedication carved: Deo Erexit Voltaire, “Voltaire erected this church to God.” The church in his town would not be named for a saint, based on the foolish notion that some heavenly being would intercede for the people of Ferney. It would honor the God of the Deists, and nothing further. The inscription and the pyramid-shaped tomb he had built to be his final resting place, half in and half out of the church, can be seen by visitors to the Chateau at Ferney today. The town itself was renamed Ferney-Voltaire in his honor. Voltaire is actually entombed in the Pantheon in Paris, but like all the great men honored there, he had painful shortcomings. Many of his writing are painfully anti-Semitic, and he took credit that really belonged to Emilie du Châtelet for scientific work they undertook together. His plays and poetry, for which he was best known at the time, are so dated they are hardly ever read. Still, there is no question Voltaire led one of the great lives of his, or any era, and that he is indeed the undisputed bad boy of the Enlightenment.

Thank you, Laurel. We wish you the best of success with FINDING EMILIE! To find out more about Laurel and her work, please visit her website.

Guest post by Laurel Corona, author of PENELOPE'S DAUGHTER

I am honored to welcome Laurel Corona, whose new novel PENELOPE'S DAUGHTER was published this month. Laurel has adapted the legendary Greek epic The Odyssey from the point of view of Xanthe, a daughter whom Odysessus has not met and a potential heir in the struggle for the throne of Ithaca. Like her famous mother Penelope, Xanthe turns to the loom to weave the story of her life and keep danger at bay; her adventures include hiding with her beautiful cousin, Helen of Troy, and her initiation into the ecstasies of goddess worship. But when a bedraggled stranger appears at the doorway of the palace, Xanthe's entire life is thrown into tumult as she confronts a fateful decision on which hinges the very future of Ithaca itself. . .

This is a marvelously engaging novel even for those unfamiliar with Homer's tale, full of Laurel's trademark penchant for historical detail and the vibrant colors of a now-lost world, where gods moved men like pawns on the chessboard of fate. In celebration of her novel's release, Laurel has kindly offered this guest post. Please join me in welcoming Laurel Corona!

The Boys of the Odyssey by Laurel Corona.
It’s just a hunch, but I think if you were to ask people on the street to name a character from ancient history, at least some of them would come up with--you know, the guy with a boat, the one who had all those adventures. Odysseus—yeah, that’s the one. Put out the Cyclops’ eye, nearly drowned a few times. Had a wife at home and had to kill all these guys trying to marry her.

It’s a great story, but as I researched Penelope’s Daughter I was stunned by how much more there is to Odysseus’ adventures. It turns out that of all the storytellers about the Trojan War and its aftermath, only Homer unequivocally saw Odysseus as a hero. In fact, he comes off pretty badly everywhere else. There’s a body of fragmentary work collectively called the Greek Epic Cycle, which in addition to the Iliad and Odyssey contains other works dealing with the Trojan War. The works in the collection include the Cypria, the Aethiopis, the Iliupersis, the Nosti, and the Telegony. Hardly household words (and barely pronounceable ones at that!), these works contain several familiar stories either not included by Homer or only briefly alluded to. The first, from the Cypria, is the story of how, when a group of Greek warriors came to get Odysseus to join the troops going to war against Troy, Odysseus feigned madness because he didn’t want to leave his wife and young son. He babbled and acted crazy, including hitching a donkey and ox to the same plough, and sowing a field with salt--craziness indeed because the soil would have been spoiled for crops for a long time to come, and rocky Ithaca had no arable land to spare. He is found out, however, when his baby son is placed in the path of the plough and Odysseus turns it aside to save his child’s life. It’s a sweet story, I think, but not really consistent with the “willing warrior” stereotype.

It illustrates a quality in Odysseus that Homer calls wiliness or craftiness, but other sources see as downright sneakiness and moral laxity. For example, when Agamemnon, the Greek commander, is stranded in Aulis by lack of wind and cannot sail to Troy, Agamemnon decides that a sacrifice to the gods would be in order. He sends Odysseus to Mycenae, where Agamemnon’s wife and family live, to get Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, to bring their daughter to Aulis to be sacrificed. Of course no mother is going to agree to this plan, so Odysseus lies to her and tells her Iphigenia is going to Aulis to be married to Achilles. They pack up and goes, and voila!—she is led off to sacrifice wearing her wedding dress. And guess what? Right afterwards the winds come up, so Agamemnon ends up looking like quite a visionary. Homer doesn’t include stories of Odysseus’ cold-blooded murder of a rival, Palamedes, nor the children he sired, according to some sources, while held captive by the goddess Circe. Slick and devious, or creative and resourceful? Self-serving plunderer, or homesick family man? It depends on who’s telling the story.

Homer also ends the Odyssey a bit prematurely, avoiding plot complications that would show Odysseus as far less faithful to Penelope than she was to him. In the Telegony, Odysseus has scarcely left Penelope after his return to Ithaca, when he arrives in the land of the Thesprotians, promptly marries Callidice, their queen, and has a son by her. When Callidice dies, Odysseus leaves the kingdom to their son, and goes home only to discover—surprise, surprise!—that Penelope had in the interim borne him another son. (You can imagine how I felt when I discovered that a baby born during the father’s absence was already part of the story!) Years later, Telegonus, one of his sons by Circe, fails to recognize the father who had abandoned him and his mother as a child, and kills him in battle. When he discovers his error, Telegonus takes Telemachus and Penelope, along with Odysseus’ corpse, back home to Circe’s island. Once there, Telegonus marries Penelope, and Telemachus marries Circe. Perhaps it’s best that Homer stopped where he did!

One more crazy story does appear in Homer but it is so nonsensical I’m not surprised most people miss it. After Odysseus kills all the suitors and reclaims Penelope, he turns around and leaves immediately--after almost twenty years away!--saying he has to go find a place where people have never heard of the sea (not heard the sea, heard of it), which in the world of the ancient Greeks would have been hard to imagine. Why did he have to do this? So he could plant an oar and sacrifice some oxen. Then, he promises he will come and grow old in Ithaca. Okay, the gods told him to do it, but does anybody want to lay bets on how quickly he’ll be back?
A second boy in the Odyssey really is a boy, Odysseus’ and Penelope’s son Telemachus. A great deal of the epic revolves around Telemachus’ ineffective attempts to assert his manhood. He’s really a sorry excuse for a warrior king’s son.Though Homer uses the stock phrases of oral poetry, making Telemachus “discreet” in thought and “godlike” in appearance, it’s hard to see how even Homer could find much of merit in his incessant whining both directly to the suitors and to others about what bullies they are. “I’m just a helpless little kid,” he seems to be saying, “but just you wait until I grow up!”

Wait a minute—aren’t we in the twentieth year of Odysseus’ absence? Doesn’t Telemachus have to be at least twenty-one? Exactly what is his excuse? Even Homer explains Telemachus’ uncharacteristic courage in the battle with the suitors as resulting from a spell cast by Athena, so I doubt even the bard himself would take too much issue with what I think is a very well deserved although rather negative characterization of him in Penelope’s Daughter.

Despite Homer’s disinclination to think of women as more than helpless victims or terrible temptresses, I think the women are by far the most interesting characters in the story. It was wonderful to imagine how Penelope, a child bride still in her teens when Odysseus left, would handle the absence of her husband for twenty years. Surely she would do more than weave and weep, as Homer suggests. We see Helen briefly in the Odyssey when Telemachus goes to Sparta for news of his father. Helen was reputedly twelve when she was married and left behind an eight-year-old daughter when she ran off with Paris to Troy. Telemachus visits in the twentieth year of Odysseus’ absence, when Helen is forty, old by the standards of the day. With all she has seen and all the powers she has gained, I found it far more interesting to imagine her at that age, when in her teens no one seemed to be able to come up with much of anything to say about her except that she was very, very beautiful. Introducing a daughter into the Odyssey broke the story wide open for me, making the tale of those left behind every bit as exciting as battling monsters, gods and heroes.

I hope my readers agree.

Thank you, Laurel. To learn more about Laurel and her work, please visit her website.