Rose Daughter shot out onto the page in about six months. I’ve never had a story burst so fully and extravagantly straight onto the page, like Athena from the head of Zeus.
I’ve long said my books “happen” to me. They tend to blast in from nowhere, seize me by the throat, and howl, Write me! Write me now! But they rarely stand still long enough for me to see what and who they are, before they hurtle away again, and so I spend a lot of my time running after them, like a thrown rider after an escaped horse, saying, Wait for me! Wait for me!, and waving my notebook in the air. Rose Daughter happened, but it bolted with me. Writing it was quite like riding a not-quite-runaway horse, who is willing to listen to you, so long as you let it run.
If you’re a storyteller, your own life streams through you, onto the page, mixed up with the life the story itself brings; you cannot, in any useful or genuine way, separate the two. The thing that tells me when one of the pictures in my head or phrases in my ear is a story, and not a mere afternoon’s distraction, is its life, its strength, its vitality. If you were picking up stones in the dark, you would know when you picked up a puppy instead. It’s warm; it wriggles; it’s alive. But the association between my inner (storytelling) life and my outer (everything else) life is unusually close in this book. I don’t know why the story came to me in the first place, but I know that what fueled the whirlwind of getting it down on paper was my grief for my little lilac-covered cottage and for a way of life I had loved, even if I love my new life better.
I think every writer fears doing the same thing again—and thus boring her readers. But what “the same thing” is may be tricky to define. I almost didn’t write Beauty; having written it, I had absolutely no intention of reusing that plot. I read somewhere, a long time ago, a French writer, I think, saying that each writer has only one story to tell; it’s whether or not they find interesting ways to retell it that is important. The idea has stuck with me because I suspect it’s true. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that my favourite fairytale came back to me, dressed in a new story, after twenty more years in the back of my mind and the bottom of my heart—and the odd major life crisis to break it loose and urge it into my consciousness.
Maybe it’ll come to me again in another twenty years.
Hampshire, England
October 1996
About the Author
Robin McKinley has won various awards and citations for her writing, including the Newbery Medal for The Hero and the Crown, a Newbery Honor for The Blue Sword, and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature for Sunshine. Her other books include the New York Times bestseller Spindle’s End; two novel-length retellings of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, Beauty and Rose Daughter; Deerskin, another novel-length fairy-tale retelling, of Charles Perrault’s Donkeyskin; and a retelling of the Robin Hood legend, The Outlaws of Sherwood. She lives with her husband, the English writer Peter Dickinson; three dogs (two hellhounds and one hellterror); an 1897 Steinway upright; and far too many rosebushes.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1997 by Robin McKinley
Cover design by Angela Goddard
ISBN: 978-1-4976-7369-4
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Robin McKinley, Rose Daughter
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