A Thousand Orange Trees
Kathryn Harrison, 1995
Gardner Books
317 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781857024074
Summary
As Marie Louise de Bourbon, niece of Louis XIV, journeys south from Versailles to marry the Spanish king, she is forced to abandon the cumbersome orange trees brought from her beloved Versailles, leaving them to wither in the chill Pyrenees.
This loss presages the future that awaits her, in a court riven by intrigue, with an impotent husband who demands an heir. Marie’s fate is dreamed of by Francisca de Luarca, as she sits in her prison cell far from the Queen’s chamber. This imaginative Castilian silk grower's daughter has fallen passionately and dangerously in love with a young priest.
In this luscious, hypnotic novel, Kathryn Harrison twists together their stories, bringing to vivid life the wonders and the horrors of 17th-century Spain, a world convulsed by poverty and religious upheaval. (From the publisher.)
More
Set in 17th century Spain, A Thousand Orange Trees twists together the stories of two women born on the same day, whose lives are devoured by the bloodthirsty Spanish state.
Francisca de Luarca, the daughter of a Castilian silk grower, is arrested by the Inquisition after a love affair with a priest and is tortured as a witch. Marie Louise de Bourbon, the niece of Louis XIV, is transported from her beloved Versailles to marry the impotent Spanish king, and is tormented by the court when she fails to provide an heir.
In her prison cell Francisca conjures up memories of her past and dreams of the Queen's life, producing a beautifully women narrative which takes historical fiction to new heights. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1961
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Standord University; Iowa Writers'
Workshop
• Currently—lives in New York City
Kathryn Harrison was raised in Los Angeles by her maternal grandparents. She graduated from Stanford University in 1982 with a BA in English and Art History and received an MFA from the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop in 1987. She lives in New York with her husband, the novelist and book editor Collin Harrison, whom she met in 1985, when the two of them were enrolled in the Writers' Workshop. They have three children, born in 1990, 1992 and 2000.
The bestselling author famously documented a disturbing triangulation that developed involving her young mother, her father and herself in the memoir The Kiss, which described her father's seduction of the author when she was twenty and their incestuous involvement, which persisted for four years and is reflected in the plots and themes of her first three novels, published before The Kiss.
While much of her body of work documents her tortured relationship with her mother, who died in 1985—the essays collected in Seeking Rapture: Scenes From a Life, a second memoir, The Mother Knot, as well as The Kiss—she has also written extensively of her maternal grandparents, both in her personal essays and, in fictionalized form, in her novels. Her grandmother, a Sassoon, was raised in Shanghai, where she lived until 1920, her experiences there inspiring Harrison's historical novel, The Binding Chair. The Seal Wife, set in Alaska during the First World War, draws on the early life of her British grandfather, who spent his youth trapping fur in the Northwest Territories and laying track into Anchorage for the Alaska Railroad.
Harrison has published six novels, three memoirs, a travelogue, a biography, and, as of June 2008, a book of true crime. She is a frequent reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, and her personal essays have been included in many anthologies and have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Vogue, O Magazine, Salon.com, Nerve.Com, More Magazine, and Bookforum, and other publications. (From Wikipedia.)
See the more on the author's website.
Book Reviews
A magical novel.
Lisa Tuttle - Time Out
Audacious feats of the imagination. This rich and complex novel is both harrowing and compelling.
Nicola Humble - Times Literary Supplement (London)
Kathryn Harrison writes about the dark side of a woman's destiny with an intensity that makes you shiver.
She
One novel I have not mentioned so far, one of the main narrative strands of which features a powerful, but doomed, love affair, is Kathryn Harrison’s A Thousand Orange Trees, which takes place in seventeenth-century Spain, at the height of the Counter Reformation. The twist in this tale, the insurmountable obstacle for the lovers, is the fact that one of them is a priest. This is a scenario which occurs in several modern romances, notably Colleen McCullough’s The Thornbirds, and is, I think, an area deserving of further exploration. The celibate priest is a fascinating variation on the classic theme of the wounded hero healed by the heroine’s love, as long as we think of love in earthly, erotic terms rather than divine love. The distinction, however, can become blurred, as in the many documented cases of visionary ecstatics, whose experience of divine love is often expressed in erotically charged terms.
Sarah Bower - Historical Novel Society
Harrison is completely at ease with the historical material, evoking with frightening detail the world of the Spanish Inquisition, whose prisoners reside, almost literally, in the bowels of Madrid. The Spanish court, too, is described with precision and colour, and its formality and restraint contrast strikingly with the splendour and exuberance of the French Court.... Maria Luisa loses every freedom at her arrival in Spain.... Her entrapment within the royal court is not at all dissimilar to Franciscaís imprisonment at the hands of the Inquisition.
Holly Davis - Deep South (New Zealand)
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
top of page