The Charmed Wife

Acknowledgments

As a child, I loved the traditional fairy tales—Alexander Afanasyev, the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault. As an adult, I questioned them. Hundreds of stories, read and reread, and years of wondering about them have formed the foundation of this book. My indirect debts are simply too many to acknowledge, but in the course of doing research, I was influenced by many fairy-tale scholars, interpreters, and storytellers, most notably A. S. Byatt, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter (The Bloody Chamber is a masterpiece), Robert Coover, Neil Gaiman, George MacDonald, Cristina Bacchilega, Ruth Bottigheimer, Maria Tatar, Marina Warner, and Jack Zipes.

A few direct borrowings must be mentioned: The phrase “wild surmise” originates in a John Keats poem, then makes its way to the ultimate line of Angela Carter’s novel The Magic Toyshop, before ending up in my beekeeper scene. The children’s counting rhyme is my paraphrase of a saying attributed to Oscar Wilde: “Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.” The quotation about women having souls is, astonishingly, real, and comes from a 1922 book, Married Life and Happiness, written by William Josephus Robinson, a prominent New York physician and early birth control advocate; I used it verbatim and only omitted one comma in deference to modern punctuation.

Research and literary influences aside, this book would not have been possible without the help of many people I am lucky to have in my life. Special thanks are due to Warren Frazier, my wonderful agent, who has always been there for me with his guidance and friendship. I am also deeply grateful to Ivan Held and Sally Kim, for their generous support and faith in my work; to Gabriella Mongelli, my editor, for her unflagging excitement about the book and her fine judgment; to Anna Jardine, once again, for her painstaking attention to the written word; and to everyone else at Putnam who worked to make The Charmed Wife a reality.

Several astute readers have seen the manuscript in its various stages and offered wise suggestions: Moses Cardona, Annie Kronenberg, Bill Reiss, and my two oldest friends, Olga Levaniouk and Olga Oliker. Britton Sauerbrei, my partner and first reader, provided me with invaluable advice on mouse behavior, found the perfect epigraph in a Timothy Steele poem, and made me very happy throughout. And, as ever, I am grateful to my family—my mother, Natalia Kartseva, who has sustained me with numerous pieces of cabbage pie and maternal wisdom, and my children, Alex and Tasha Klyce, who prefer stories quite different from the ones I myself loved as a child and who never stop teaching me new ways of seeing the world.

Last but not least, prompted by my daughter, I must mention Brie, Nibbles, and Nibbles Junior—the three orphaned baby mice who were not with us for long, in spite of a number of sleepless nights I spent feeding them milk-diluted peanut butter from an eye dropper, and yet whose brief existences inspired the ongoing mouse plot of the book, in particular the idea of mice substitutions. There had been only two mice to start with, Brie and Nibbles—we found them squealing in our basement one spring evening, their mother likely caught by the neighbor’s dog. The original Nibbles died in the night, and I was just debating how to break the sad news to my children when, providentially, I happened upon yet another blind mouseling crawling in the basement. I tried to pass him off as Nibbles in the morning; my children, however, were more observant than the oblivious princess of my story, and, my ruse soon discovered, he became Nibbles Junior. Odd are the ways in which life finds its way into literature.