The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann

The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann

By Virginia Pye

Released October 3, 2023

Victoria Swann is a successful 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 when she goes against her publisher's demands and abandons her frivolous style to tell her own story. Her new, young, Harvard-bred editor becomes her unexpected ally as she fights for the women who have been her faithful readers. Set in Gilded Age Boston, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann shows writing and reading as acts of defiance and revision in life and revision on the page as intimately entwined.

Virginia Pye’s story collection Shelf Life of Happiness won the 2019 IPPY Gold Medal for Short Fiction and her two historical novels set in China, Dreams of the Red Phoenix and River of Dust, also received literary awards. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is Fiction Editor at Pangyrus and has taught writing at NYU, UPenn, and at GrubStreet Writing Center in Boston.