Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

Soundtrack For a Story: The Summer Country

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I finished my second round of edits on The Summer Country the other day! To celebrate, I’m dusting off another old post from the archives: my musical playlist for this book. I’d forgotten, this was actually the very first time I made a playlist to go along with a story in progress, almost exactly nine (!) years ago. Here’s what I wrote back then:

Music and writing have a kind of odd relationship for me. I adore music, and it definitely inspires my writing, but unlike a lot of people, I can’t listen to it while I write. Either I get too focused on the writing and wake up to find I’ve missed my favorite part of the music, or I listen to the music and can’t concentrate on writing. I guess it’s because when I listen to music I like to savor it; to listen closely to every note, to wait for those favorite moments and relish them when they arrive.

But as I said, music still definitely inspires me. Mostly instrumental music. Some people draw inspiration from song lyrics that tie into the themes of their story; while that does happen to me occasionally, I get a lot more from listening to classical music and film scores. They become the soundtrack to my story. I imagine certain scenes playing out to them, or link particular musical themes with characters. My favorite time to listen to music like this is late at night, when it’s dark and quiet and I can pay full attention to it and let my imagination spin. And then eventually the things I dream up work their way into my daytime writing sessions.

The playlist itself has undergone some slight changes since then; a couple tracks have dropped off and a few new ones have been added. But the core of it is essentially the same:

  • The “Mississippi Suite” by Ferde Grofé. As usual, there’s often little to no thematic connection between the original intent of the music and my story. I have no idea how music inspired by the Mississippi River fits The Summer Country, which is set entirely in turn-of-the-century New York and—well, in dreamland—so well, but it just absolutely is the soundtrack for this story. Three of the four movements (“Huckleberry Finn,” “Father of Waters,” and “Mardi Gras”) are so closely linked to specific scenes in the story they seem to have been written especially for them, and the fourth, “Old Creole Days,” does fit the mood of certain parts.
  • Suite from The Heiress by Aaron Copland. Here I think there is a subconscious mental link, with the film being set in old-world New York City, albeit several decades earlier. It sets the mood nicely for the city scenes in The Summer Country, and some of the more dramatic moments later in the story.
  • “Allfriars” from the score to The Buccaneers by Colin Towns. Another piece, from a Gilded Age period drama that I haven’t seen, which just seems to fit the old-world historical side of the setting. Other tracks from the same score didn’t strike me the same way, which shows you just how random a process this playlist business can be!
  • “Toyland” by Victor Herbert, performed by the Capitol Symphony Orchestra. Fun fact: I actually use lines from this song as a chapter epigraph in the book! The themes of childhood nostalgia and imagination make it a thematic fit, and this lush instrumental arrangement fits in perfectly with the other orchestral pieces in my playlist.
  • “Lullaby for Pegi” by John Rutter. I can’t remember whether I heard this on the radio first, or stumbled across it on YouTube—but it’s amazing to me how perfect a companion it is to my central character, a young girl named Peggy, who spends much of the story telling bedtime stories.
  • “Waltz” from Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky. A waltz plays a rather key part in The Summer Country, and when I was first thinking about it, the beginning of this one was what kept running in my head. Most of it’s rather bigger and grander than the one I have in mind, but the rhythm of that first theme definitely inspired it.

image: “Twilight Dancers” by Morgan Weistling

From the Archives: Emily’s Journey

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This is a revised and expanded version of a blog post from ten years ago.

As you might expect from my name, I’m considerably Irish in ancestry. More than half Irish, in fact, when you add it all up, but it doesn’t all come from the paternal side—as I’ve put together my family tree I’ve discovered a strain of Irish in practically every line. They’re often the hardest lines to trace, given the predominance of the same surnames and common given names being used over and over in Irish families! But at the same time, one of the few stories from my family history that has actually been passed down directly to me through the few intervening generations also comes from an Irish line—the story of one of my maternal great-grandmothers.

Her name was Emily, and she was born in 1891 in a brick row house in South Dublin, the third of four children and the second to live past infancy. Her father, the son of a farmer from Limerick, was a police constable; her mother was the daughter of a Tipperary groom; and her maternal grandmother lived with the family. I discovered for the first time when I located the family on the Irish census that Emily’s full name was actually Mary Emily, though she went by her middle name for most of her life, and by the end of it was using the “M” as a middle initial. (She had also trimmed a few years off her age by the end of her life, so that her tombstone gives her birth date as 1894!)

And in 1908, when she was seventeen years old, she and her fifteen-year-old brother Joseph set out across the Atlantic together, bound for America, to join their older brother John who had emigrated three years earlier. They sailed from Liverpool on the RMS Celtic, traveling second-class, and arrived at Ellis Island on November 14th, 1908, after an eight-day voyage. Their final destination was further up the Hudson in Troy, then a thriving industrial city of steel and textile mills, where John had settled with American-born cousins. Emily lived with a female cousin and worked as a stitcher in one of Troy’s famous collar shops, and in 1919, she married a first-generation American, the son of a German father and Irish mother, newly returned from serving in World War I. She would become the mother of eight children, five of whom would outlive her, and one of whom would be my grandfather.

Emily’s father never made it to the New World, but twelve years later, in 1920, her now widowed mother Margaret emigrated to join her children, her passage across the Atlantic paid by her eldest son. Possibly the onset of World War I in the same year her husband died prevented her traveling sooner.

(An interesting footnote that I only uncovered in recent years is that Emily’s grandmother Maria died in the infirmary of the South Dublin workhouse in 1913—though likely not because of poverty, since the record of her death lists her home address as with her son-in-law’s family. The likely reason was that Irish hospitals of this period would not take patients suffering from chronic illnesses, such as tuberculosis, and so those who could not afford other treatment were sent to a workhouse infirmary. Since chronic nephritis (a kidney disease) was listed as Maria’s cause of death, this explanation makes sense. Just three years later, the South Dublin workhouse was one of the buildings occupied by Irish rebels during the Easter Rising of 1916.)

I never knew my great-grandmother. I’ve only seen a few snapshots of her as a stout, white-haired elderly woman, and heard relatives speak of her who knew her in later years. But in a way, I think it almost makes it easier for me to picture her as that little Irish girl of more than a hundred years ago; to imagine the emotions and the untold stories of her journey. Five feet two, brown hair, blue eyes, able to read and write, ten dollars in her pocket…the passenger records fill in some of the details. I wonder what kind of a girl she was. What did she feel about leaving her homeland—was the thought of America exciting or intimidating to her? Was her younger brother (three inches taller) a companion she could lean on, or was she the leader of the two? What was the ocean voyage like for her? And how did she feel when she had her first glimpse of New York City from the deck of the Celtic?

Years of digging among genealogy records have filled in some more pieces to the story of their decision to emigrate. I found that eldest brother John had already tried his luck working abroad in England, and that one of their American cousins had visited Ireland shortly before John set out to join that same cousin’s family in Troy—probably at his encouragement. But the more personal aspects of the story still can only be conjectured. What kind of family discussions were held, what letters exchanged across the sea…what made their parents decide to send Emily and Joseph on alone? Those stories I may never know…stories that will have to live only in my imagination, stirred and prompted, perhaps, by the accounts of thousands of other families who lived the same story of crossing the ocean to a new life. But still it brings my knowledge of history closer and makes it more real, more lifelike, to know that someone connected with me walked the streets, saw the sights, and lived their life in an era that I research and read about and write about today…because it’s my history, too.

Re-Introducing “The Summer Country”

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Some time ago, I went through my blog and unpublished a whole slew of posts related to unfinished novel projects. I was genuinely unsure whether these particular books would ever be finished or not, and I (a) didn’t like the idea of blog readers maybe getting interested and hoping to read the finished story, and then being disappointed when it never came; and (b) was depressed myself by looking at all those posts, reminders of what I saw as a string of failures.

Fast-forward to the present. At least one of those unfinished manuscripts remains decently archived as an Early Work (primarily useful in having taught me how to write a book and how not to write a book); but a couple of the others—to my own surprise—have since taken a new lease on life. I’m actually not sorry I unpublished those old blog posts. It took off some of the pressure of feeling that I needed to finish those books as soon as I could because I’d publicly committed to them…and it also means I now have the pleasure of digging some of that old material out of the archives and sharing it again, as I hopefully inch closer to finally being able to share at least one of those books with the world.

If you’ve been around here a long time you may remember The Summer Country. It was one of those ideas that dropped on me out of nowhere, which I had to run with simply because it entranced me too much not to. It’s a middle-grade, non-magical children’s historical fantasy set in Edwardian-era New York, about five orphaned siblings living with an uncle, and their adventures involving dreams curiously connected to the bedtime stories told by their oldest sister. The best way I can describe it is that if you love the children’s classics of E. Nesbit, J.M. Barrie, France Hodgson Burnett, A.A. Milne, Elizabeth Enright, and C.S. Lewis, this should be the book for you. In fact, one of the joys of writing this story has been recognizing the subtle and not-so-subtle influences of the books I loved through childhood shaping my own vision and style.

Here’s some of the snippets I originally shared when I was drafting The Summer Country several years ago, polished up a bit to match the edits I’ve done since:

“Why, to smell the flowers,” shouted the Little Old Man, trying to use his walking-stick as a megaphone and then realizing it wouldn’t work. “You’re looking for the garden, aren’t you? Well, you certainly chose the hard way in, but it’s there all right. Just keep going right—I mean left! Left. Yes, that’s right.”

*

There were plenty of rooms in Uncle Timothy’s house, Morrie had once observed darkly, leaving it to be concluded that there was something else missing.

*

“Dear me,” said Mrs. Butler in a voice of genteel surprise, which made her sound like she was a long way off from the confusion, perhaps viewing it through an opera-glass. “And what is all this?”

*

And when he had gone out she slipped into the front parlor, leaving the others still chattering in the dining-room, and watched from behind the lace curtains as he went down the street along the sidewalk, with his head bent a little. Nobody should walk with their head bent that early in the morning.

*

“Perhaps I’m just too civilized,” said the Gentleman Traveler, “but I don’t exactly relish the idea of being close to the ground. It’s dusty.” He glanced down at his immaculate patent-leather shoes.

*

In the doorway she remembered something and turned back. “Oh, Uncle Timothy, I forgot—Cook has given notice.”

This time Uncle Timothy put down his paper. “What for?”

“I think she said something about the meals being irregular.”

Peggy had a very good vocabulary. What the cook had really said was a long speech without stopping for breath about houses where meals were never eaten at the same time twice in a week and had to be warmed over so many times of an evening that they couldn’t hardly be called meals at all.

Status of this project? Interesting question. I finished the first draft early last year, got a developmental edit on it, let it sit for a bit, and now I’m doing some revisions. I don’t know exactly what route to publication I’m going to take yet. I feel like this book needs something a little bit different than anything I’ve done so far—I’m considering possibly exploring the idea of a hybrid or small press. But I feel more confident now that some way, sometime, you’ll be able to read the finished product.