Kate Mosse
‘I want my next bestseller to be my great-gran’s forgotten novel’
Novelist Kate Mosse has revealed how the book she really wants published isn’t one of her own.
The bestselling author wants to get her great-grandmother’s novel back into print 130 years after it was first published. She only discovered her ancestor, Lily Watson, was a famous novelist while researching her family history during lockdown.
She now hopes to see Watson’s novel, The Vicar Of Langthwaite, which was published in 1893 and reprinted in 1897 with a foreword by former prime minister, William Gladstone, sold beside her own.
“I’m trying to get my publisher to agree to republish The Vicar Of Langthwaite, which I haven’t yet succeeded in that, but I will,” said Mosse.
She has used her ancestor’s story as the spine for a new non-fiction book that highlights over 1,000 women whose achievements had been previously written out of history. “My great-grandmother’s absence from the official record, from history, tells the story of so many women,” Mosse added.