NORA SMITH
Staff Writer
Anna North is on a mission to bring women’s stories to the forefront of the literary canon.
The novelist and journalist whose work centers on prioritizing a woman’s journey through her writing returns to Chautauqua Institution as a Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle author to round out Week One’s “Icons and Instigators: Women Who Change the World.”
North first visited Chautauqua in 2022 to present her novel Outlawed, a feminist Western novel published in 2021 that went on to become a New York Times bestseller and Washington Post Best of the Year selection. Now, she returns four years later with a new literary work.
“I think for a long time, a lot of the stories that we had available to us about heroes, people going on quests, people going on journeys — a lot of those were about men,” North said.
In North’s newest novel, however, readers don’t just follow along one woman’s story but two separate ones.
At 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy, North will present Week One’s CLSC Selection Bog Queen: A Novel. Here, she plans to focus on how each character came to be and the growing importance of telling a woman’s story.
“I think part of it, too, is just making the decision that the telling the story, the stories of women doing that work is viable,” North said. “It’s always been a sort of project of mine to put women in those stories.”
After its 2025 publication, Bog Queen: A Novel was labeled as The New Yorker best book of the year and National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Selected Title, among many other achievements.
In her presentation, North plans to focus on how being on the outside of something can influence one’s perspective in a positive way, in addition to the obstacles it presents. For example, one of the characters in Bog Queen: A Novel finds herself left out as a female in her field, an American in England and overall, just feeling like she doesn’t quite belong.
The novel’s concept first struck North when she encountered the Lindow Man, which according to the British Museum’s website, is a “well-preserved human body found in a peat-bog at Lindow Moss, near Manchester, in 1984.”
“Here’s someone who’s been dead for thousands of years, and yet is clearly still a human being,” North said. “That really moved me and sort of made me feel better about death in a way, like this person is dead, but his body is still here in a very real way. He’s still here with us.”
After seeing the Lindow Man, North heard the story of the Lindow Woman, who was discovered a year before the Lindow Man was found.
According to an article by the British Broadcasting Corporation, in 1983 a body was found in peat at a bog called Lindow Moss in Cheshire, northwest England. At first, it was believed to be Malika De Fernandez, a missing woman and wife of Peter Reyn-Bardt, who had confessed to killing her at the discovery of the body.
However, a closer examination revealed that the body was that of a woman who lived over a thousand years earlier.
This story of the Lindow Woman further inspired North and led to the historically based plot of the novel. From there, North was inspired to write a mystery based on the story of the Lindow Woman, and out came Bog Queen: A Novel.
The story’s narration switches back and forth between three interconnecting narratives after a body is found in the bog: set in 2018, the perspectives are those of a young forensic archaeologist named Agnes, a Druid Queen set thousands of years prior and lastly, the bog that ties the narratives together.
When writing the novel, North said she had been interested in weaving the different stories and timelines together, examining the different ways of knowing that Agnes and the Druid use and the differences between both characters.
When crafting Agnes’ character, North said she conducted interviews with her archaeologist friend who has experience studying bones. She also spoke to numerous other friends and mythologists to build the legitimacy of the characters and plot.
“There were kind of specific questions that I had related to the plot, like, ‘What would you do first if you found a bog body?’ and one of them said ‘Well, I would probably need to find a bioarcheologist right away.’ So that is what Agnes does,” North said.
What helped North when it came to writing from the bog’s point of view was reading Plant-Thinking, a philosophy book that explores the idea of plants having consciousness.
“It was very helpful, not necessarily in directly crafting the voice of the bog, but just letting me know that people have been thinking about this and I’ve been trying to think through the point of view of plants, and it sort of gave me permission to do that,” North said.
As a through line throughout her literary work, North blends her experience in journalism and novel writing with her determination to tell a woman’s story, and today, she’ll share this with Chautauquans.
