Inspirations for the story . . .

On September 11, 2001, while Americans were waking up—unsuspecting—to a beautiful, autumn day, I was in Amsterdam (7 hours ahead of my compatriots) visiting Rembrandt’s House Museum (http://www.rembrandthuis.nl/cms_pages/index_main.html). On that day, the top-floor gallery featured a number of Rembrandt’s sketches and engravings, one of which struck me particularly.

Rembrandt

The story's germination was an ink drawing (on loan from New York’s Metropolitan Museum) of a young woman’s body hanging from a gibbet with an ax dangling near her: “Elsje Christiaens hanging on a gibbet” (c. 1664). The figure looks as lax, as if she had just that moment died in her sleep rather than having been garroted and then put on display outside town.

(The following webpage displays the image, an description, and a Biblical reference, which strikes me as quite apt in light of what I know about Rembrandt: http://www.artbible.info/art/large/384.html).

Elsje’s story is told in Geert Mak’s Amsterdam: a brief life of the city (London: The Harvil Press, 1999), which forms the basis of a subplot in The Posthumous Wife.

Sources


In writing The Posthumous Wife I relied heavily on the following sources:

Gluckel of Hameln. The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln. Translated by Marvin Lowenthal. New York: Schocken Books, 1977.

Mak, Geert. Amsterdam: a brief life of the city. London: The Harvil Press, 1999.

Nadler, Steven. Spinoza: a life. Cambride: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Nadler, Steven. Rembrandt’s Jews. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Safley, Thomas Max. Matheus Miller’s Memoir: A Merchant’s Life in the Seventeenth Century. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

Zumthor, Paul. Daily Life in Rembrandt’s Holland. Translated by Simon Watson Taylor. Standford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. 

You will enjoy The Posthumous Wife if you enjoyed these novels:

Chevalier, Tracy. The Girl with a Pearl Earring.