Laura McNeal's "The Swan's Nest"

Laura Rhoton McNeal holds an MA in fiction writing from Syracuse University and has worked as a freelance journalist, a crime writer, and a high school English teacher. She is the author of the novels Dark Water, a finalist for the National Book Award, The Practice House, and The Incident on the Bridge. She and her husband, Tom, are the authors of Crooked, Zipped, Crushed, and The Decoding of Lana Morris.

Here McNeal dreamcasts an adaptation of her new novel, The Swan's Nest:

My novel, The Swan’s Nest, is about an impossible thing. A 32-year-old man wrote to a 38-year-old invalid he’d never seen and said he loved her. They corresponded for five months. What happened when they met is still being written about in universities around the world and celebrated in Valentine’s Day cards. The London door through which the man’s eloquent letters were pushed was saved from demolition in 1937 and carried across the Atlantic to Wellesley College. It stands in the college library as a monument to faithful, blind love.

The romance happened in the mid-19th century, before photographs of people began to be common. Elizabeth Barrett, the poet, had a sketch of Robert Browning’s face, but Robert had no likeness of Elizabeth at all. He didn’t know her age or the nature of the illness that kept her confined in her room. And yet, when he wrote his first letter to her, he said he loved her verses with all his heart and he loved her, too. This is the kind of thing that a romantic person (or a maniac) might say, and that’s how Elizabeth treated it—as a fictional notion he must dismiss. As time went on and he persisted, she believed that a little light on her “ghastly face” would be enough to discourage him.

For me, the problem of a movie based in fact, especially historical fiction, is the dilemma of how people and places actually looked. If the heroine was plain or short or disfigured or old, and if they lived in small, dingy rooms, the truth of that ought to be visible, or you’re not telling the same story at all. The one inescapable tyranny, I think, is not race or wealth but beauty. We accept attractive people of every race and class; those we do not find beautiful never get the same treatment.

The two actresses who remind me of Elizabeth Barrett are Bel Powley and Sally Hawkins. Powley, with her enormous eyes and pale skin, looks like the idealized portraits of Elizabeth, in which sympathetic artist friends made Elizabeth's face more symmetrical and her eyes larger. Sally Hawkins has what I think of as Elizabeth’s irrepressible charm, and she resembles the Barrett-Browning photographs from later years. Characters that Sally Hawkins plays tend to overcome everything through sheer will and affection—Elizabeth Barrett had that quality, too. She was by all accounts intensely, almost supernaturally radiant.

If I could choose any director, it would be Jane Campion, who made a ravishing movie about another small poet who died of lung disease: Bright Star, which tells the story of John Keats and Fanny Brawne. I never watch Bright Star (which I watch over and over) without wishing I could go and live inside it.

I doubt that Jeremy Allen White has ever noticed, but he looks a lot like Robert Browning. And wouldn’t it be interesting to see him go from a Chicago sandwich shop to 19th century London?

Visit Laura McNeal's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Laura McNeal & Link.

My Book, The Movie: The Incident on the Bridge.

--Marshal Zeringue