Hosack's Folly A Novel Of Old New York

Author's Insights Hosack's Follyis a tribute to the great age of novels, the world of Austen and Dickens, but with an American setting. Comedy, political intrigue, and romance are all in abundance--I wanted the richest ingredients for a novel-lover's feast. An "historical" novel, Hosack resurrects nineteenth-century New York as an age of epidemics. In the 1820s, New York faced a convergence of crises, in the threat of yellow fever imported by ships from the Caribbean, and the deteriorating water supply. It was a defining moment for the city, when its very future was in question. So much has been written about the excitement and decadence of the 1920s, the age of Gatsby. But few Americans know that the 1820s was the original boom decade in America, an age of great wealth, high living, and social transformation--and the time when New York first emerged as the nation's most glamorous and important city. Steamships carried news and fashions from Europe, the westward expansion brought riches to the city ports, and the rise of Andrew Jackson gave ordinary men their full political rights for the first time. The social impact was dizzying. In Hosack's Folly, almost everyone is on their way up or down, as the old aristocratic order of landowners gives way to the new world of bankers, businessmen and newspaper celebrity. And, as in the 1920s, corruption is a ready temptation for those desperate to make their way in the new New York. Because I am a novelist and not an historian, my main concern in the book is with people--how my characters feel and react to stresses, both personal and social. Some become visionaries; some become villains. And some become lovers, who would not have otherwise. 9/11 is our own benchmark--how a global event can effect the most ordinary people in the most personal way. The yellow fever threat was just such a factor in New Yorkers' lives in the age of Jackson. A principal concern ofHosack's Follyis the lives of women. Taking after Dickens, I have an ensemble cast from all social ranks, but if there is a principal character it is not Dr. Hosack or his dynamic young assistant Albert Dash, who are the obvious heroic male figures. The most sympathetic character is Virginia Casey, the daughter of a controversial newspaper editor, whose frustrated love for Albert is symptomatic of her larger predicament: an intelligent, ambitious young woman stuck in a society where only the men attend university and have professions. Albert is teaching her botany, and she is a brilliant student, but there is no career path for her. Only at the end of the novel, as a consequence of calamity (not to give too much away!), does the door crack open for her just a little...Wood, Gillen D'Arcy is the author of 'Hosack's Folly A Novel Of Old New York', published 2006 under ISBN 9781590512296 and ISBN 1590512294.