ELISSA NADWORNY, HOST:
The heroine of our next story is Miss Alice Lockey, the daughter of a tenant farmer on the estate of Bevil Marlecombe, fourth Earl Alderwick.
AYELET WALDMAN: (Reading) At the time of our telling, Alice had, by dint of hard work, innate intelligence, a skillful hand with a needle and a sense of style and color in clothing unusual for a girl of her birth raised herself to the lofty status of lady's maid to Lady Jemima Alderwick, eldest daughter of Lord and Lady Alderwick. Alice had thus far resisted the temptations of matrimony, preferring to enjoy the fruits of her own labor, or at least that part of it her father returned to her when it was paid to him by the steward at the end of each quarter.
NADWORNY: Until, that is, Alice falls for Charlie Wells, valet to the eccentric Lord Wynstowe. To be together, Alice and Charlie must devise a plot to bring about an unlikely romantic union between their employers. "A Perfect Hand" is Ayelet Waldman's new novel, and she joins us now. Hello.
WALDMAN: Hello. It's so great to be here.
NADWORNY: I'm curious about the title, "A Perfect Hand." Is there a little bit of a double meaning there?
WALDMAN: Yes. So a hand in marriage, obviously, but also, there's this concept in Victorian England of the perfect hand. Like, a lady should have a beautiful, perfect hand - very white, very kind of soft, no calluses. It should not have done any work but the most delicate needlework, which - I embroider and quilt, and I can tell you, my hands are very callused from the needle. I don't know how they maintain their perfect hand. But sort of the irony is that Jemima, who is the lady in this novel, she actually has kind of not particularly pretty hands and also very, very stinky feet. And...
NADWORNY: (Laughter).
WALDMAN: Our heroine, who's a maid, actually has beautiful hands. I don't go into her feet, but I assume they're beautiful, too.
(LAUGHTER)
NADWORNY: Because they're a maid and a valet in the 19th century in England, Alice and Charlie - they don't have a lot of ability to choose their own fates. What obstacles do they face in actually being with each other?
WALDMAN: So they each work in a separate house, a great house. And they meet because, at the time, the wealthy people would sort of travel amongst each other's houses, sort of like vacations, right? They would go and they would spend a couple of weeks at one house for the shooting and then go to another great house and invite one another back and forth. And that's how the two of them meet. But if they wanted to stay together, they really had to be in the same house. And then they could see each other and be in regular contact. So they concoct this plan that if their employers fall in love, then they can live in the same house and be together. But, of course, their employers despise one another.
NADWORNY: (Laughter).
WALDMAN: And so that's what they have to do. They have to figure out a way, essentially, to manipulate and trick these two people who hate each other into falling in love.
NADWORNY: OK. But at the same time, Alice is also beginning to have some questions.
WALDMAN: Yeah.
NADWORNY: Can you tell me about this pamphlet that she reads? It's called A Brief Summary In Plain Language Of The Most Important Laws Concerning Women: Together With A Few Observations Thereon. (Laughter) I just love that title.
WALDMAN: It was literally the title of a pamphlet that actually existed. And basically, what was happening at this time is there was starting to be this notion, very early, of women's rights. This was before the suffrage movement really started. But there were writers, women and men - John Stuart Mill was a feminist writer - who were starting to write about the laws of property and the laws of inheritance and all the things that kept women in their place.
And essentially, at the time, a woman was the property of her father. Everything she owned belonged to her father. And then when she married, she became the property of her husband, and everything she owned belonged to her husband. And there were starting to be these writers who said, you know, this is - it's absurd. That's not fair. We should allow women to control some part of their own income and their own property.
NADWORNY: So this pamphlet - what does that spark in Alice?
WALDMAN: Well, it kind of sets a little bit of a fire in her mind and in her heart. And she suddenly starts to imagine a future for herself that isn't just servitude, that isn't just marriage. There's this larger cause that she might want to be a part of. And that wasn't where I was going when I started the book. I was writing a pure marriage plot. It was going to be my version of Jane Austen, my very favorite kind of book. But then all of a sudden, there's this thing that happens. I don't want to sound, like, twee or pretentious, but there's this thing that happens when you're writing where sometimes the characters just take over and they start driving the car, and you're a passenger.
NADWORNY: (Laughter).
WALDMAN: And you're just like, OK, Alice, take me where you're going because this is way more interesting than where I thought I was going. And that's what happened with this character. She just took over.
NADWORNY: So you started with a story about a lady's maid and then...
WALDMAN: Yeah.
NADWORNY: ...Ended up with a story about a suffragist.
WALDMAN: Yep. That's exactly what happened. Which, I guess, when you think - when I think about myself, makes sense, but it certainly wasn't what I thought was going to happen. I thought I was going to stay in that fancy house forever. I love those houses.
NADWORNY: (Laughter).
WALDMAN: Parties, dresses. I could go on.
NADWORNY: (Laughter).
WALDMAN: Crinolines.
NADWORNY: Can you read another section for us? Maybe about when Alice and Charlie are talking about the nature and purpose of marriage.
WALDMAN: OK.
(Reading) Why do any of those endowed with the gifts of rank and wealth marry? For status, for fortune, for property. A baronet seeks the hand of a daughter of an earl, an earl that of a marquis. A man of fortune but no rank marries his daughter off to a man with the latter but not the former. One with rank but no fortune makes the opposite choice. Though the gentry talk of love, they marry for any reason but. Then we are lucky, Charlie said. How so, Alice said. We have neither estates nor money. We are free to marry for love. Are we, she asked? Are we not? Don't poor women marry for protection and security?- Alice asked. And don't poor men, because they need children as laboring hands and a wife to bear them?
NADWORNY: Charlie has these baked-in assumptions about the future life that he and Alice are going to live. He does love her. Like, I believe that. But what is he missing with those plans?
WALDMAN: It's not that he's missing a sense of her. The first thing that attracts them to each other is they're both reading. She's reading "Emma" by Jane Austen, and he comes and he talks about it. And he tells her about a Dickens that he loved. So they connect on this intellectual level. Those books are about, you know, different kinds of people, especially the Dickens.
But what Alice has and that Charlie doesn't is the capacity to imagine something completely different. 'Cause her brain goes to this really revolutionary place, which is so unusual. There were suffragists who were starting to gather and have meetings and think about these things. But for a servant girl, that's really unusual. That's where Charlie has a problem following her. He wants to. He wants to love what she loves. He wants to honor who she is. But he has a kind of constricted capacity for imagination that I don't think is unusual. I think that's actually the typical thing. It's Alice who's unusual.
NADWORNY: You promise the reader that this is a love story.
WALDMAN: 'Cause I love a love story, and it is. The people who fall in love may not be who you expect to fall in love, but it's a love story.
NADWORNY: Is giving someone the right to self-determination also a kind of love?
WALDMAN: I think it's the most important kind of love. Do you remember that poster that people - half the girls in your college dorm had up? If you love someone, let them go. If they come back to you, they're yours. If they don't, they never were.
NADWORNY: (Laughter).
WALDMAN: I know I'm not remembering right. It was, like, with a flower. I mean, really, that's what it is, right? If you love someone, let them go. If they come back to you, they're yours. If they don't, they never were, right? So I think it's the clearest and purest expression of love.
NADWORNY: Ayelet Waldman. Her new novel is "A Perfect Hand." Thank you so much.
WALDMAN: Oh, thank you. This was really delightful.
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