Interview with Jane Lancaster

Is this your first book?
I’ve already published four nonfiction books. They include Inquire Within, a history of the Providence Athenaeum, and Making Time, a prize-winning biography of Lillian M. Gilbreth. She was an industrial engineer, with a PhD from Brown between her seventh and eighth children, but who was also known as the mother in the book by two of her children, Cheaper By the Dozen. Liberty is Sweet is, however, my first novel.

Can you give a brief overview, including the genre?
It’s a historical novel set in the era of the American Revolution, based on the fragmentary existing evidence about a Rhode Island family, Arthur and Phebe Bowler and their daughter Betsy. Arthur was captured as a boy in Africa, and enslaved by a wealthy Newport merchant, while Phebe was born free in Portsmouth, RI, to a Narragansett mother and enslaved African father. They witness the growing tensions in Newport, as their enslaver/employer spies for the British, and wonder what it means for the enslaved Arthur. By taking a series of risks, they create a new life for themselves.

What inspired you to write it?
I’ve been studying the so-called Black Loyalists in Rhode Island for some time, and have written several non-fiction articles about them–in fact one is coming out this summer in a joint issue from Newport Historical Society and the Rhode Island Historical Society. But there are gaps in the historical evidence, and as historical fiction is one of my favorite genres–indeed, I’ve been part of Bob Martin’s LLC Historical Fiction Club for five years–so I decided to try my hand.

Have you always wanted to write?
Yes and no. I remember feeling very pleased when I was nine, and a teacher praised a story I’d written; it was a dramatic, journalistic account of a flood which had killed dozens of people in the south of England. It was much later when I tried again, and my earliest writings were all nonfiction.

Which book(s) can you read over and over?
Very few, as there’s so much I want to read. Ones I have repeated include George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm, and Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, which is a historical mystery novel.

Did you read when you were a child (picture books, middle school, classics, YA)? Any favorites?
One I remember from being very young was Pookie Puts the World Right, which concerns a rabbit who wishes winter will never happen, which leads to all sorts of environmental problems. As it was published in 1949 it was very much ahead of the curve! Of course, as an English child I read all of Edith Blyton Famous Five and Secret Seven and strange as it may seem, I loved to read my Thorndike Junior Dictionary which I still have, though I don’t consult it much anymore.

Where can people purchase the book?
From me, when I give a presentation; from Amazon, local bookstores, and also on Kindle, Nook, and through public library streaming services.

How long have you been a member of LLC?
5 years.

Do you have favorite courses you have taken?
Historical fiction and Scrabble.