Martha Hall Kelly Follows Success of 'Lilac Girls' with 'Lost Roses'

Martha Hall Kelly had never written fiction before she penned her 2016 bestselling debut, Lilac Girls, a historical novel inspired by the true story of New York socialite Caroline Ferriday’s fight to help the Nazi concentration camp survivors known as the "Ravensbrück Rabbits." But even before its publication, the New England native knew she had to continue writing about the characters she’d come to know and love and was hard at work on a second novel.

That book, Lost Roses, the first of two prequels to Lilac Girls, tells the story of Caroline’s mother, Eliza Ferriday, who fought to save a group of Russian aristocrats fleeing the brutality of the Bolsheviks during World War I. Like Lilac Girls, the novel focuses on three women from vastly differing worlds: Eliza; Sofya Streshnayvas, Eliza’s friend and a wealthy relative of tsar Nicholas II; and Varinka, a Russian peasant who cares for Sofya’s son. Their stories intersect amid the violent tumult of revolution and war, displacement, love, and loss. A young Caroline is also in the book, along with her father, Henry.

As with Lilac Girls, Lost Roses required meticulous research that took Kelly to Russia, Paris, and the Ferridays’ homes in New York and Connecticut. Kelly talked to Goodreads contributor Catherine Elsworth about the women at the heart of Lost Roses, history from a female perspective, and the second Civil War–set prequel she’s working on now.


Goodreads: At what point did you know you wanted to write a book about Caroline’s mother, Eliza? Was it while you were still working on Lilac Girls?

Martha Hall Kelly: I had never written anything before Lilac Girls except advertising. I wrote commercials and print ads. But when I started writing the novel, I just loved it and knew I wanted to keep doing it somehow. I thought this would be a really good way to keep writing about this family, because I had already done so much research. And then I considered it a sign when I found an old newspaper clipping in a drawer at Caroline Ferriday’s house in Connecticut [the Bellamy-Ferriday house in Bethlehem where Kelly was originally inspired to write Lilac Girls and conducted so much research that "just going into that house now, I really feel her. It's incredible"]. I was at a photo shoot for Lilac Girls, sitting at Caroline's desk. I just happened to open one of her drawers, and there was a very old newspaper clipping in there—Caroline kept everything, which was really great for me as a researcher. It was a photo of Caroline holding a doll, she was maybe 16, and wearing a kokoshnik, the traditional Russian jeweled headdress.

The article was about her mother, Eliza Ferriday, and how she was helping women émigrés who had escaped Russia. She had turned her beautiful Manhattan apartment into a permanent bazaar to sell Russian handmade goods brought over from Paris. So I just thought, Wow, the mom was really instrumental in being such a great role model for Caroline, and I wanted to show that.

Also, after I finished Lilac Girls—and back then I had no idea if anyone would even read it—someone told me you should always just start writing your next book right away because otherwise you're going to just wait around being nervous. So that's what I did. I started writing it almost a year before Lilac Girls came out. And I think that was really good advice because it not only helped me write the next book, but it took my mind off waiting for my first book to come out.


GR: So you started with Eliza. How did you develop the characters of Sofya and Varinka?

MHK: I knew I wanted a bridge to Russia, and I wanted to invent one of the émigrés that Eliza had worked with. During my research, I came across one woman, Countess Edith Sollohub, who I just could not stop reading about. She was so interesting, down to earth, and so lovely, and I thought, OK, I'm going to base Sofya on her. I just fell in love with her. And that's what seems to happen with my characters. If I love them, I feel like my readers will, too.

Also, I felt I had to go to the setting, just as I had with Lilac Girls, because when I went to Ravensbrück and to Germany and Poland, it made the story come alive. So when my husband and I went to Russia, it really helped me. Because of Sofya being a cousin to the tsar, I had to go to all the palaces, and that was really interesting. But I also had Varinka, who is a peasant, because I wanted to show both sides of the story, and so I did a lot of traveling to rural parts of Russia, which was interesting, too.

GR: Do you think your Eliza is like the real Eliza?

MHK: I don't know. It's hard. With novels, you just cannot be boring. I tried to stay with what I picked up from letters and pictures—just the funniest little odds and ends can give you a real clue to what someone is like.

I have to be a real detective when I'm writing, almost an archaeologist, finding these little hints and clues everywhere. So I do feel like I stayed very true to the facts with Eliza, but also gave her my own [sense] of what I hoped she was like. A bit of a bohemian streak and a lot of fun. I knew she loved to travel, I knew she was the driving force behind Caroline's career as an actress in theater, so she loved theater and had many friends in the theater. So from that I gave her personality.

GR: How do you manage the interplay of fact and fiction in your novels, building your story around actual events?

MHK: I love having real events to work with. It just gives you something to hang their clothes on. Basically, I just dive into the period first and once I feel like I can walk around in that world and live and breathe and see things, only then do I feel like I can start writing about it.

I like to go with the truth first, that's my rule. Because I think the truth is so much more interesting than anything that I can make up, and you feel it on the page if it's real like that. But if I do run up against something that isn't right for my story and I have to invent something or embroider it, I feel like I can do that because I've stuck so closely to the story in other ways.

GR: Lilac Girls and Lost Roses share the same structure of three alternating female narrators. Why did you choose that?

MHK: I loved The Help, and when I first started writing, since I'd never really studied writing in college, I thought that I could write it like The Help, and that's how I started in first person. I wish I had a fancier answer, but it's basically that. I really liked the way The Help wove a braid together of these three very interesting women, and I thought, Well, if Kathryn Stockett can do it, I can, too.

GR: Do you write them sequentially, or do you take one character at a time?

MHK: I write them in a braid, definitely. Because that way I'm surprised all the time by how one chapter can influence another, and it's fun as you're writing to discover things like that.

GR: Did you ever consider having one of the perspectives be a male character?

MHK: No. I didn't even think about it. I was never a huge history fan in school. I felt like it was taught from such a male perspective. I really didn't enjoy it. And then I had one female teacher in high school, and she changed history for me. She taught it from more of a female point of view, and I just thought, Wow.

After that, I really sought out history from a woman's point of view, and back in the '70s and '80s it really almost didn't exist. If you look at the books that had been written on Ravensbrück, most of them are written by men. And so I was just much more interested in the woman's point of view because I think it's so much more interesting as a woman to know what it was like for them, what they cared about. So I have male characters in all my books, but [the story is] not told from their point of view.

GR: As in Lilac Girls, there’s great suffering and trauma in Lost Roses. Do you need to emotionally decompress after writing these stories?

MHK: Not really. When I was writing about the horrors of Nazi Germany in Lilac Girls, I would pick my son up from school and he would say to me sometimes, "Have you been writing a Herta [the Nazi doctor] chapter?" which [didn’t make me] mother of the year. But I wasn't aware of that. I was so mesmerized by the story and so involved in it.

I really felt responsible for these women's stories, and the same is true with Lost Roses. I felt responsible that I was their conduit, and I needed to make their stories come alive in order for people to care about them. I felt like they had been forgotten, and so that was my mission. I never felt like, "Ugh, this is too much."

GR: Lilac Girls was the first fiction you wrote. You spent a decade researching the book, and it sounds like it was almost a surprise to you when you began the novel. What was that experience like?

MHK: Looking back on it, it was incredible. I went up to the Bellamy-Ferriday House because I wanted to see the lilacs in the garden, as my mother had just died and she loved lilacs. Then on a whim I went on a tour of the house. At the very end, the docent said, "Here's Caroline's desk and this is where she wrote with her old manual typewriter," and I said, "What is that photograph?" because I was drawn to this black and white photograph of 35 or so ladies. And she said, "Oh, that was the Rabbits" and she explained the whole story to me. And I just thought, How does that get lost? How did a story like that not get remembered? Especially when we really need women to look up to in this country.

So I started researching it and kept going until we had to move to Atlanta for my husband’s job. And one day I dropped my son off at school and went to the Starbucks drive-through and ordered my usual decaf cappuccino, but by mistake the barista gave me a caffeinated one. I went home and started writing, and it all just started coming out. That's why, when I say I wrote it like The Help, I had no idea what my options were. I just thought, "OK, I better grab this while I can, and I'm going to do it in first person," and that's how it started.

GR: What was your reaction to the impact and success of Lilac Girls?

MHK: I'm still not quite sure it has all happened. It's very strange. I remember the book came out on a Tuesday, and they sent me one copy and I thought, Is anyone going to read this? I got a phone call while I was at my UPS store, and it was my publisher. All I could hear was women screaming and champagne corks popping and people saying, "You made the New York Times bestseller list!" And it was hard for that to sink in, standing in a strip mall outside a UPS store.

Ever since, it's been this crazy ride of people reaching out and this incredible love from readers and from everybody. It's been amazing.

GR: What’s your average writing day like?

MHK: I try and get up early because I really feel like all the good things happen, writing-wise, pretty early. I sit and just write, mostly longhand, and then I put it into a Word document. By 3 p.m. I’m usually more into the research because the actual writing is pretty intense. If I ever do get (I hate to even say the word, but...) blocked, I feel that I probably shouldn't be writing. And ways that I can get around that are by diving into my research for inspiration—right now that’s Civil War books.

But if a scene, for me, isn't working after a little while, I just abandon it. Because it's not good if it's not getting me excited. And then by 7, my husband is home and I start smelling garlic or whatever is cooking and that's my sign to stop. We read at night, he's a big reader. Usually it’s more research or once in a while something fun.

GR: Who are some of your favorite authors?

MHK: I love historical fiction. I love Amy Tan. I love Christina Baker Kline’s work. I dove into E.B. White when I was writing Lilac Girls and have not come up for air. I'm from Massachusetts, and I feel like I was OK with the New England voice, but reading him really helped me in that way. All of these women, the Ferriday women or the Woolsey women, they're New England women. So that voice is really important. So I just love E.B. White. I don't know how he does it.

The very first book that I fell madly, passionately in love with was Good Times, Bad Times by James Kirkwood. He passed away young sadly, but I still go back and read that book. I also really love Jane Austen. I know it's kind of a cop-out because everyone does, but I just find myself going back to all of her books over and over. And all the Brontë sisters. I feel like women writing about women, you can't get any better than that. Another book I loved is Lily and the Octopus by Steven Rowley. I sobbed for a good hour after I read it. Anything with a lovely animal in it will get me.

GR: I loved the character of Eliza’s mother, Caroline Carson Woolsey Mitchell, in Lost Roses. Is she the focus of your second prequel?

MHK: So in my Civil War book we meet her as a young woman, but the book is told from the point of view of her sister, Georgeanna, who is one of the Woolsey women of New York. There were seven sisters and one brother. We see Carry, the youngest of the sisters, in New York, but really the story is from the point of view of Georgy, who became one of the first nurses on the Civil War battlefield.

GR: How much have you written?

MHK: The whole thing is outlined, and I'm about halfway through part one.

GR: Will the title also have a flower in it?

MHK: Yes. This one is going to be—it's a big moment revealing this—a sunflower. I think it will be called Sunflower Sisters, but I don't know yet.

I always like to write about sisters—I have two sisters. I don’t know why, but I just keep writing about them. That and mothers. They do say write what you know.