Meet the Author Virginia Pye!

Join Viriginia Pye as she talks about her newest novel, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann. 

Book: Set in Gilded Age Boston, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann tells the story of a successful woman author of romance and adventure novels who becomes a champion of women’s rights as she takes on the literary establishment and finds her true voice, both on and off the page. Everything changes for Victoria Swann when she goes against her publisher’s expectations and abandons her frivolous writing style in favor of telling her own story. This seemingly personal decision causes her to lose her standing with her publisher, her income, and her marriage, as she joins the legions of hard-working young women who have been her most faithful readers. Her new young Harvard educated editor becomes her surprising ally as she fights on behalf of these same women, while he dares himself to become a more liberated, modern gentleman. The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann shows how writing and reading, like all acts of defiance, can liberate us from narrow, constrained lives—and how revision in life and revision on the page are intimately entwined.

About the Author: A prolific writer, Virginia’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, Literary Hub, Publisher’s Weekly, The Rumpus, Huffington Post, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Writer’s Digest, as well as in numerous literary magazines. A graduate of Wesleyan University, she holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has taught writing at New York University and the University of Pennsylvania, and, most recently, at GrubStreet’s Muse and Marketplace Conference in Boston. 

Virginia Pye grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and moved back after thirty-five years living up and down the East Coast. Upon returning, she was struck by how Boston, and specifically Cambridge, is noticeably more bookish than all the other cities where she’d lived. Her latest novel, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann, explores Boston’s literary past and is a love story to books, bookstores, libraries, writers, and, most of all, readers.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase courtesy of Storybook Cove.