PHOTO: Emily Franklin, bestselling author and poet, whose work captures both the intimacy of the personal and the sweep of history.
Blending Poetry Prose And Past Into Lyrical Narratives
Author Emily Franklin reflects on art, history, motherhood and creative expression, sharing insights into her genre-spanning work and the emotional resonance behind her characters, poems and historical fiction.
Emily Franklin writes with the sensibility of a poet and the curiosity of a historian—always listening, always noticing. Her work, whether in verse, memoir, or fiction, seeks out the quiet intimacies of the everyday while illuminating the lives that have shaped culture and memory. In The Lioness of Boston, she resurrects Isabella Stewart Gardner with luminous detail, offering readers not only a richly imagined portrait but a meditation on legacy, loss, and art as autobiography.
There’s an ease with which Franklin moves across genres, yet her hallmark remains: emotional precision rooted in lyrical clarity. Whether recounting the beautifully chaotic years of early motherhood in Too Many Cooks or tracing the intricacies of longing and identity in Tell Me How You Got Here, her writing pulses with sincerity and grace. She brings to the page both a scholar’s insight and a mother’s intuition, never shying away from complexity.
Franklin’s forthcoming novel, Love & Other Monsters, promises another compelling excavation of history’s overlooked figures—this time with Claire Clairmont at its heart. Her fascination with voices on the periphery, those dismissed or half-remembered, speaks to a deeper desire to understand how art, emotion, and myth collide across time.
What emerges across her body of work is a vision that is at once intimate and expansive, deeply human and quietly transformative. Emily Franklin reminds us that storytelling, in its finest form, is not just the act of remembering—it is the art of making others feel seen.
What first drew you to the life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, and how did you begin shaping her story in The Lioness of Boston?
I grew up half in the UK and half in Boston. During the Boston years, I would often go to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum with my father. I was astonished by the interior courtyard—it’s filled with plant life and architectural objects illuminated by the overhead glass panels. And the art—Botticelli and Titian and Renoir, but also writing desks and lamps and vases, the many chairs she arranged—some priceless Duncan Phyfe and some simple metal garden chairs she collected because she liked them, and even a lock of Robert Browning’s hair. Everything is arranged just as Isabella left it because she’s stipulated that nothing should ever be moved or changed. I was drawn into the idea that anything could be art, and that the museum told her life story through objects. In March 1990, I was a student and sat in the very cavernous Dutch room at the museum and wrote a paper on Rembrandt’s Storm in the Sea of Galilee and Vermeer’s The Concert. Ten days later, those paintings were cut from their frames and stolen in one of the largest art heist in history. The empty frames are still hanging because of her directive. They became a lovely but haunting metaphor—evidence of what was there and what has been lost. When I went back to the museum years later, I was struck by the other visitors, speaking about the art and the grandeur of the building, but never once mentioning Isabella herself. This was a woman who was ahead of her time, whose mission was to make art accessible to the public, who paved the way for other art collectors such as Peggy Guggenheim, and who was friends with Henry, James and John Singer Sargent, and became a celebrity before celebrity culture existed. I wanted to bring her story to life.
Your work spans genres from poetry to food memoir to historical fiction—how do you approach the creative process differently depending on the form?
I started life as a poet. My creative process still comes from hearing a line in my head, or noticing a detail in the natural world or studying people. The language is the start of the story or poem or essay or TV pilot, and I often don’t know the form until I have some words on the page. As I explore and research, I try to focus on the idea and the questions I’m trying to answer and see what the story turns out to be as I go.
In Tell Me How You Got Here, your poems explore deeply personal themes. How do you decide which moments in your life are meant for poetry rather than prose?
Poetry is really taking these big ideas and winnowing them down into the most compact—but still breathable—space. There are sometimes small elements of my life in the poems or in my stories, but most often, everything is imagined. Poetry is a very intimate form so it’s natural to think the poems are all non-fiction, but while some details are real (observations about the natural world, or a food or loss), the stories into the poems might not be. I try to blend specifics with the shared human experience no matter what I’m writing.
Your food memoir Too Many Cooks blends humour with parenting and food—how much of your real kitchen chaos made it into the pages?
This was a fun memoir to write, and of all my books, it’s the one my children have spent the most time reading and commenting on. Those years of having four children under eight with no childcare were truly happy chaos. I tried to document this for readers, along with recipes I introduced to help my children explore new flavours and tastes. I wanted to share the funny and sometimes painful parts of parentings. My children are much older now and while I love my relationships with them, I do miss those days.
Many of your characters seek connection and self-acceptance—how do your own experiences shape the emotional journeys in your fiction?
I am trying to understand the world as I write. The characters I create, whether entirely imagined or based on a real person, are often looking for connection to others or to the natural world or to themselves. Perhaps not so much self-acceptance, but understanding. My latest novel, Love & Other Monsters (coming in April 2026), is historical fiction set in 1816. It’s a story of love, lust, art and betrayal, based on the important—and forgotten—life of eighteen-year-old Claire Clairmont who was Mary Shelley’s stepsister who was Lord Byron’s lover and played an integral role in Mary and Percy Shelley’s marriage. It’s about the making of art, the pitfalls of fame, the dangerous loyalty of siblings, the monsters on the page and those who walk among us as men. This is the story of a specific person, but if I’ve done my job, readers will relate to Claire’s emotional journey. That’s the poetry technique again, taking the very specific and making it accessible and relatable to each reader.
What advice would you offer to emerging authors trying to balance authenticity with storytelling across different genres?
Read widely. I read everything from Sarah’s Hart’s Once Upon a Prime, a brilliant book about maths and literature to Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! to Tana French to Ross Gay’s poetry. It’s important to keep the flow of ideas.
