Thank you to global event technology platform, Eventbrite, for challenging book bloggers like myself to come up with our dream list of authors or characters we’d love to hear speak at a conference. We’re allowed to jettison reality (after all, most of us spend a lot of our time in fictional worlds anyway), so my fantasy book conference is entitled: Two Characters in Conversation with their Authors.
First up, Mrs De Winter from Rebecca will be quizzing author, Daphne du Maurier. Questions (if she can summon up the courage to ask them) are likely to include:
- Why didn’t you tell the reader my first name?
- Would you try your hand at writing a sequel to Rebecca?
- Aside from Max and me, who is your favourite character in Rebecca?
- Mrs Danvers and Rebecca – any girl-on-girl action going on there, do you think?
- What do you reckon a white ball gown, barely worn, might fetch on eBay?
- Do you have a cousin called Rachel?
- Mr Rochester from Jane Eyre – snog, marry, avoid?
Next Jane Rochester (nee Eyre) interviews her creator, Miss Charlotte Brontë. Expect probing (but polite and morally uplifting) questions such as:
- [Spoiler Alert] Did you cry when writing the scene where Helen Burns dies? If not, why not – the rest of us did.
- [Spoiler Alert] What do you think would have happened if I’d chosen St John Rivers over Mr Rochester?
- The Red Room at the beginning of Jane Eyre – does it worry you it now has quite different connotations in the book world?
- Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys – intertextual masterpiece, literary deconstruction of the concept of the “Madwoman in the Attic” or cheap rip-off?
- Admit it, don’t you wish you’d written Wuthering Heights instead of your sister?
- Max de Winter from Rebecca – snog, marry, avoid?
Moderator for the conference, to maintain control in case things get fiery or supply a witty one-liner if the conversation lulls, Miss Lillian Boxfish (of Lillian Boxfish Takes A Walk by Kathleen Rooney).
So, that’s my idea – now over to you!
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