Stephanie Cowell Blends Art, Music and Imagination into Timeless Historical Fiction

PHOTO: Stephanie Cowell, award-winning author and former opera singer, at home among the arts that inspire her evocative historical novels.

A Journey Through Creativity, Romance, and Historical Truths

Stephanie Cowell discusses the inspirations behind her acclaimed novels, her transition from opera to writing, and how music, history, and vision shape her characters, settings, and emotional storytelling.

Stephanie Cowell brings an artist’s heart and a historian’s soul to the page. A former opera singer and founder of arts festivals, she weaves her deep love for music and storytelling into richly layered historical novels that explore the lives of creatives through time. From Claude Monet and Mozart to Shakespeare and, most recently, the Brontë sisters, Cowell’s fiction brims with lyrical intensity and emotional resonance. Her latest work, The Man in the Stone Cottage, due in September 2025, promises a haunting reimagining of Emily Brontë’s inner world.

In this candid interview for Reader’s House Magazine, Cowell reflects on the decades-long journey behind The Boy in the Rain, her fascination with artistic lives, and how her background in music continues to shape her literary voice.

Cowell is a masterful storyteller whose lyrical prose and deep historical insight breathe life into the forgotten corners of art and history.

In “The Boy in the Rain,” you explore a same-sex relationship in Edwardian England. What inspired you to delve into this period and subject matter?

In the mystical way my stories often happen to me, I had a vision while walking down the outer wooden stair by a country house of two men standing there in circa 1900 clothes. When I turned around, they were gone but they kept haunting me. I finally told two friends who challenged me to write something of them down. I did but it was horribly rough. I was an opera singer then, not a writer. I left music and began to write novels but “The Boy in the Rain” always seemed to want another draft and my then major publishers felt an Edwardian love story of two guys would not sell enough copies. After I had published five other novels, a friend sent me to a small publisher who loved it. From first notes to first printed copy, it had been a journey of 39 years.

“I have a very lyrical writing style, quite cadenced. And I think of the novel in sections like chamber music.” – Stephanie Cowell

Your novel “Claude & Camille” portrays Claude Monet’s early life and love. How did you balance historical accuracy with creative storytelling?

I grew up the daughter of artists and was taken to art galleries since I can remember. Over and over, I heard the stories of the struggles of great artists. One day I when my writing career was well launched, I went to an exhibition of the early impressionists at a museum and there was a small, intimate painting done by the artist Bazille of all his friends (including Monet, Renoir etc.) in his studio in Paris circa 1869 when they were unknown. I was so struck by the fierce friendship between them and the determination they would all succeed. For research, I think I bought and read about 75 books and visited many museums. But the day-to-day life you have to create as we don’t know exact conversations.  So you respectfully create based on history. I had an awful time with finding much about Camille, Monet’s muse, model and wife. During my writing of the novel, someone found a diary speaking of her written in Paris 1860s. It was discovered in a box in a closet no one had cleaned out in over 150 years.

“Marrying Mozart” focuses on the Weber sisters and their relationships with Mozart. What drew you to their lesser-known stories?

I sang a great deal of Mozart opera over many years, and always thought I’d write about him. I was sitting in a Viennese café one day as a cd played one of his horn concertos which was so utterly happy, and I remembered years before reading that he had had been close friends with the four musical daughters of a second violinist at the court orchestra in Mannheim. And that he had been 21 and lonely and looking for jobs, and one girl had jilted him, but he eventually married another. I wrote the plot a little like a Mozart opera. It is my happiest book.

In “The Players,” you depict Shakespeare’s formative years. What challenges did you face in bringing such an iconic figure to life?

I truly had to use imagination for that because very little is known about his early years. I have loved the plays since I was very young, and I read an amazing number of scholars. The great Elizabethan scholar A.L. Rowse told me to study the sonnets which became the heart of the book. I still have my tiny blue sonnet book, quite marked and tattered.

Your upcoming novel, “The Man in the Stone Cottage,” explores the Brontë sisters’ struggles. What new perspectives do you aim to offer on their lives?

I had spent days in the Brontë parsonage in Haworth, Yorkshire, which remains much as it was in the 1840s when the book takes place. It is very haunted. I felt the three sisters and the brother in such an intense way. The book is secondly about the bonds between sisters and the search for love and the struggle to keep the roof over their heads. They were poor. But the main story is a man Emily discovers in a stone cottage on the moor and becomes intensely close to though no one else has ever seen him. Is he real? And what is reality? How much do all of us create in some ways those we love? And do they then walk the earth?

Many of your works centre on artists and musicians. What fascinates you about creative figures from history?

I grew up in a family and a community of artists. It never occurred to me to find a profession in anything else but the arts. All other work was somehow not quite real to me.

How has your background in classical singing influenced your approach to writing historical fiction?

I have a very lyrical writing style, quite cadenced. And I think of the novel in sections like chamber music or opera. Parts are allegro, quick and sprightly.

What advice would you give to aspiring authors interested in writing historical novels?

I think you need to fall entirely in love with a period of history andwant to know it in its smallest detail. The challenging thing is making the reader see enough detail to know we are in a very different time, but all through a character’s eyes. The characters have to be as real as people crowding you in a bus. It’s wonderful that they know things that you do not and do things differently yet feel so much of what you feel.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

A beautifully written, emotionally rich novel that captures forbidden love with lyrical prose and historical depth—heartbreaking, tender, and unforgettable.

Verified by MonsterInsights
Update cookies preferences