Rosemary Poole-Carter

​​Lenore James, a woman of independent means who has outlived three husbands, is determined to disentangle her brother Gilbert from the beguiling Charlotte Eden. Chafing against misogyny and racism in the post-Civil War South, Lenore learns that Charlotte’s husband is enmeshed in the re-enslavement schemes of a powerful judge, and she worries that Gilbert’s adoration of Charlotte will lead him into disaster.

 

Inspired by a production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Lenore adopts the role of Paulina for herself to discover how far Charlotte’s husband bears the blame for his wife’s fate and whether or not he is capable of atonement. In her process of unraveling the intricacies of the lives of others, Lenore finds that Gilbert’s love for Charlotte is, indeed, his saving grace while Lenore’s passion for creative expression is her own.

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“Misogyny, racism, and murder . . . it’s Southern Gothic mystery at its finest, with a little Shakespeare and A Winter’s Tale thrown in.” Pamela Fagan Hutchins, USA-Today bestselling author and host of Wine, Women, & Writing podcast

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Trade paperback available from your favorite bookseller.

Audiobook available on Libro.fm, audible.com, google books, and many other platforms.

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The Story Behind the Book

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Only Charlotte began, as many of my writing projects do, with a cardboard manuscript box in which I collected ideas for scenes and bits of dialogue scribbled on scraps of paper. The first note to go into the box read something like this: a woman is poisoned, declared dead, and closed up in a makeshift coffin. Over the months as I filled the box with more jottings on index cards, torn napkins, empty envelopes, and old receipts, the box became emblematic of a woman’s confinement in suffocating darkness. Time had come for me to draw a full breath and spill the contents of the box to look for the pattern in scattered fragments that would become a novel. The scraps were covered with particulars—named characters in their own time and place of late 19th century New Orleans, experiencing their personal conflicts. Yet anyone, regardless of time or place, could feel as trapped as they, restricted to a role one felt duty-bound to perform, while longing for light and air. Only Charlotte began with that longing pressing against the inside of a box lid.

 

One idea led to another. While looking at a graphite drawing in The Menil Collection, I asked my daughter, who was an art student, how the artist had achieved the effect of rumpled cloth draped over a table. She said the ripples and contours appear when the artist draws not lines but shadows. My daughter’s explanation, striking a chord with my Southern Gothic sensibility, became an approach to the fabrication of my novel, character and substance appearing in contrast to their shadowy surroundings. Thus, I decided to reveal the title character in relief against other characters and interpret her identity through the eyes of the novel’s narrator, Lenore James, and through the actions of Lenore’s brother, Gilbert, whom she suspects is obsessed with Charlotte. 

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After having researched and written other novels and plays set in post-Civil War Louisiana, a time and place of endless fascination to me, I know there is always more for me to learn. In the process of writing Only Charlotte, I turned to three dear friends who have become Three Graces to me. One friend, a reference librarian, guided me to history books and sent me articles and website links to broaden my understanding of my characters’ viewpoints and motivations, which range from humanitarian and fair-minded to racist and misogynistic. I asked another friend, also a librarian, what sort of woman she might have been if she had lived in late 19th century New Orleans, and her answer became Lenore—thrice widowed, opinionated, and independently wealthy. Lenore, inspired by a production of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, narrates her own tale with an eye for the dramatic, enhanced by my discussions with a third friend, an actress and singer, who shares my love of theater. 

 

Combining research with pleasure, I’ve traveled numerous times to New Orleans, staying on North Rampart Street in my favorite bed and breakfast, Marigny Manor House, the model for the house where Lenore and Gilbert live in my novel. On my visits, I have felt their presence and Charlotte’s accompanying me through the streets and along the levee and especially in the halls and rooms of Marigny Manor. Built in 1848, the house has outlasted slavery and war and weathered hurricanes and holds over a century and a half of spent human energy and emotion. There, where spirits of the past linger, I experienced something inexplicable when following my imaginary characters across the threshold into the physical world they might have inhabited.

 

Elements of Victorian literature and Renaissance drama that so captured my youthful imagination—the storm-swept landscapes, labyrinthine architecture enclosing madness and monstrosity, duels between good and evil, and duality in a single troubled mind—continue to haunt me, even as they shift over the American South and into the Southern Gothic. For me, traditional Gothic characters such as the patriarchal tyrant and demonic female are transformed into a plantation master and his eccentric lady, who cover their cruelty and perversion with a sense of entitlement or a genteel veneer. Through writing, I have gone exploring into an uneasy past, finding the grotesque amid the ordinary, and now come back to the cardboard box and the first slip of paper I tossed inside it. That old Gothic fear—premature burial—started me on the novel path to Only Charlotte and led me to meet along the way a man seeking his saving grace and a woman finding her creative expression. 

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