Under a Gilded Moon(120)
The character Lilli Barthélemy was inspired, as fans of Edith Wharton will no doubt have guessed, by the protagonist Lily Bart in Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Mentioned as Lilli’s aunt in this novel, Wharton was a close friend of George Vanderbilt and a visitor to Biltmore.
Sol Lipinsky, briefly mentioned, was an early Jewish resident of Asheville whose Patton Avenue department store, Bon Marché, was an elegant addition to the town, which began its boom with the arrival of the railroad and visitors arriving from the North.
Annie Lizzie Hopson is named after and loosely based on the author’s great-grandmother, who arrived in the Southern Appalachian Mountains as a young woman to teach in a one-room schoolhouse.
Ling Yong (listed also as Ling Gunn, which the author surmised was a mishearing of the Chinese name) is based on an actual man who lived in Asheville in 1895–96. Clippings referring to his existence and apparently brutal death after this novel’s time period were deep in the city archives.
Robert Bratchett is based on an African American man who lived in the region at the time. His life ended tragically at Biltmore Junction in 1897, the year after this story stops, in racial violence. He is also commemorated at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, founded by Bryan Stevenson.
Other historically based groups and events mentioned in the novel include the Ligue Nationale Antisémitique de France, as well as the Chinese Exclusion Act of the 1880s and the lynchings of Italians in New Orleans in 1891. The Center for Peace and Justice has documented that the 1890s saw more lynchings of African Americans and all groups in the United States than any other single decade.
The Biltmore Estate, still owned by George Vanderbilt’s descendants, remains the largest private residence in the United States and has become one of the largest employers and tourist destinations in the Asheville, North Carolina, area.
Just for fun, as a kind of shared wink with the savvy reader, I included some addresses with historical and literary significance. The boardinghouse where Kerry visits Dearg Tate at 48 Spruce Street, for example, was indeed owned at the time by Mrs. Alice Reynolds but was later where the writer Thomas Wolfe lived as a boy, and is the boardinghouse at the center of his novel Look Homeward, Angel. Ling’s fictional shop at 55 Haywood Street is the address of what is now the much-loved Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café.
Dog-loving readers will be pleased to learn that the four-legged character Cedric, the faithful, drooling Saint Bernard, is based on the historical canine, and was beloved by George Vanderbilt. A pub in Antler Village on Biltmore Estate is named in Cedric’s honor.
Acknowledgments
I always come to the task of listing those to whom I’m indebted with an overwhelming sense of gratitude—like being reminded that, while I’ve been doggedly swimming along, I’ve been held up less by my own strokes than by wave upon wave of friends, family, and incredibly talented fellow writers and publishing professionals.
I’ve often listed friends and family individually in the past, but part of the richness of living and writing for increasing years is having a longer and longer list of folks who deserve naming—which also makes it more treacherous if you can’t stand the thought of leaving someone out. Please know I’m so grateful for you friends who make life rich and challenging and good—and that I’m thinking of your faces and names as I type. Enormous thanks as always to my family: my husband, Todd Lake; my kids, Jasmine, Justin, and Julia Jordan-Lake; my mother, Diane Jordan; my brother, David Jordan; my sister-in-law, Beth Jackson-Jordan; their kids, Olivia, Catherine, and Chris Jackson-Jordan; my mother-in-law, Gina Lake; my brother-in-law, Steven Lake; my kids’ godparents, Ginger and Milton Brasher-Cunningham, also a writer; and a host of treasured cousins and cousins-by-marriage all over the United States.
As with every book, I’m so grateful to my agent, Elisabeth Weed of The Book Group, for being wise, encouraging, savvy, and generally fabulous. At Lake Union, I continue to be grateful for editorial director Danielle Marshall’s being willing to take a risk on my last novel, A Tangled Mercy, and for being intrigued by the idea behind this one, even in the roughest of early forms. Danielle, I am so thankful for your support, your insights, your strength, and the way you ferociously champion the books you care about. On the editing front, I’ve never yet had an editor on any book whom I didn’t like and appreciate for the ways in which he or she was helping my writing be better than I knew how to do alone, but developmental editor David Downing is among the very best out there, from giving an insider’s view of quail hunting and shotgun handling to helping judge whether a particular character was too saintly, too sinister, or just plain dull. Erin Calligan Mooney provided invaluable insights on the manuscript, as did Blake Leyers. In copyediting and proofreading, Emma Reh, Lindsey Alexander, and Carrie Urbanic kept me honest on all sorts of details I’d have missed. Graphic designer Rex Bonomelli designed a cover that somehow beautifully suggests the tension between Gilded Age wealth and Appalachia culture, as well as the mystery I was hoping for. From author relations manager Gabriella Dumpit to PR gurus Dennelle Catlett and Maggie Sivon and so many others, the entire Lake Union/Amazon Publishing team has been such a pleasure to work with.
I feel fortunate to get to learn from, laugh with, and vent alongside a multitude of writer friends, including those in the fabulous Dutch Lunch writer tribe, the NINC 4Ever group, Lake Union Authors, the SCBWI Mid-South group, the Historical Novel Society of the Midsouth, and individual writer-colleague buddies, including Suzanne Robertson, Susan Bahner Lancaster, and early reader and giver-of-feedback Elizabeth Rogers. Novelist Bob Dugoni and the multitalented Cristina Dugoni became encouragers and friends of Todd’s and mine at a time when my writing life badly needed an extra shove. It’s a privilege to ride the crazy writing life roller coaster with all of you writer friends. Thank you for the times you’ve been vulnerable about your disappointments and struggles, as well as for letting me celebrate your triumphs with you.