Need JSTOR Access to Write Your Book? Why Spinoza? Sadly, Ester’s struggle to persist—to refuse defeat even when everything around her tells her to sit down and mind her manners—continues today for many women and girls.

But the fact remained that I needed focus and time and it was hard to get those things. And I’m appalled when I think about the message our country is now sending to young girls about whether or not their voices matter.

An important issue, and it felt right to let Helen Watt and Aaron Levy battle it out a bit over who has a right to the newly discovered trove of papers. My work time and my concentration were so fractured that I thought I’d never be able to write the kind of book I wanted to write. Honestly, it took forever…but I also loved every part of the research. Thanks for the kind words! Most of the time, I had only the vaguest idea of where the plot might be heading. The more I learned about that particular Jewish community, the more it fascinated me. It took a lot of late nights of reading after my kids were in bed. Ester (scrounging for the physical ink, paper, time in order to work), struggles to make a life for herself as a learned woman who wants to be an intellectual under incredibly fraught circumstances. Can microbes make safer colors? And I’d switch back to the present to see. I was amazed by the level of detail—the reader really sees, smells, feels Esther’s daily life in London. Perhaps most importantly, I learned that people’s humanity—their fears and aspirations and even their humor—is visible in the simple facts of the historical record, if you look closely enough.

They crossed our path and we lived to tell the tale.

Hala Alyan, on researching Salt Houses Ester, our seventeenth-century scribe, struggles with the impossibility of being both a woman and a writer/thinker. Honestly I don’t know what stubbornness possessed me, because I really struggled with the material. (I know, I’m idealizing philosophy here. What is your background in terms of philosophy? Then I’d work in the seventeenth century for a while until I thought: ok, but now what? Seventeenth century texts like Pepys’s diary or Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy were essential as I figured out what sort of language I could and couldn’t use in those portions of the novel. A line he particularly puzzles over serves as the epigraph for the book. “What might it have taken for a woman of capacious intelligence in that era not to die without writing a word?”, “It’s astonishing what you can find with a little searching!”, “I learned that people’s humanity—their fears and aspirations and even their humor—is visible in the simple facts of the historical record, if you look closely enough.”. Will Helen and Aaron misunderstand the document Ester is writing? JSTOR®, the JSTOR logo, and ITHAKA® are registered trademarks of ITHAKA. From the outset, Helen was always a non-Jewish Englishwoman. And I’ve always felt a bit of envy for those conversant in philosophy—it seems possible that they’ve found a way to reap the moral clarity of religion without falling subject to the partisan and parochial messes that so often surround religion. We asked her all about it: Amy Shearn: The Weight of Ink weaves together a couple different stories, jumping in time between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. 3-8, By: E. N. Adler and El.

I’ve always loved English literature, and of course when you’re an Anglophile English major, Shakespeare is everywhere you turn. Try JPASS! Segundo de Chomón made “trick films” that experimented with color and temporality, influencing the surrealist work of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. And inevitably there would be some unexpected detail I’d discovered in my research that would provide the seed for a new idea for the novel. All Rights Reserved. Set in London of the 1660s and of the early twenty-first century, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven tale of two women of remarkable intellect: Ester Velasquez, an emigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, jus Did you write one storyline and then the other? Much is said nowadays about the fate of print. I love seeing his handwriting! …and of course, resources I found through JSTOR were enormously helpful!

Microbes Might Paint Your Next Party Dress, At First, the Guitar Was a “Women’s Instrument”, Bog Butter Barrels and Ireland’s 3000-Year-Old Refrigerators. Who Wrote the Declaration of Independence? I learned about paper conservation, and how to write with a quill pen. So that helped me feel more resolute and less despairing. I kept thinking that there must be a more sensible and efficient way to plan and write a complex novel, but this was the only way I could do it. Did you ever worry that you would never finish, that it would come to nothing? Then I’d research for a while, then I’d come back and finish the scene. (For example, in researching what my characters might be wearing on an outing, I learned that London’s high-society women sometimes went out for strolls wearing black face masks. Help us keep publishing stories that provide scholarly context to the news. While I know that’s the likeliest outcome, I couldn’t help wondering what it might have taken for a woman of capacious intelligence in that era not to die without writing a word.

This issue of appropriation is so much in the air right now. And I didn’t do all the research in advance, but rather alongside the writing. What is the significance of an archive, anyway? And I learned an enormous amount from reading about the artwork and fashion of the era, and from books about philosophy and philosophers—particularly works by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Steven Nadler, and Jonathan Israel. Author Rachel Kadish tells us about how she used JSTOR to research her fascinating, complex new novel, The Weight of Ink. Did you know from the start that you wanted to write the book this way? Does Dark Tourism Exploit Tragedy for Profit. What made you decide that Helen should not be Jewish in the first place? Here she dreamcasts an adaptation of her latest novel, The Weight of Ink: For Ester Velasquez, who would have to radiate intelligence as well as a mix of passion and wariness, I’m going to go with Natalie Portman.

Their determination and their fears reminded me in some ways of the Holocaust refugees I knew as a child.

It was easy to get lost in reading about daily life in seventeenth-century London, and I was fortunate to find wonderful resources—everything from Liza Picard’s detail-packed Restoration London to Miriam Bodian’s work on the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam. Helen studies ancient archives, straining to decipher (and to physically preserve, despite a tremor in her hand that often threatens the delicate papers) the complex politics and philosophies Ester once wrote about. What made you include it in this story? So it felt both natural and appealing to write a story about history showing up uninvited, presenting a mystery my characters feel compelled to solve. What’s the best part of being in a writers’ group? I had huge maps of 1600s London on my wall, and of course I visited London—though I had to be careful to distinguish today’s city from the London that existed before the 1666 fire. How was I supposed to have a vivid and continuous dream when there was always a sick child, a snow day, an absent babysitter? Get your fix of JSTOR Daily’s best stories in your inbox each Thursday. Do we absorb ideas best when read on paper or digitally? Set in London of the 1660s and of the early twenty-first century, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven tale of two women of remarkable intellect: Ester Velasquez, an emigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague hits the city; and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history. …and I won’t say more, because that would spoil some discoveries I hope readers will make within the pages of the novel.

The official “fashion month,” September has concluded its parade of gorgeous outfits. Ester is looking through a copy of Philosophical Transactions in chapter 18, in the scene in which Béscos catches her reading and begins his threatening line of debate. The writer, believing no one will read his/her words, seeks to pay tribute to a man who has been betrayed.