Deborah Harkness, the ‘Accidental Novelist,’ Has Years’ Worth of All Souls Books in the Pipeline
When Deborah Harkness—No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of the All Souls fantasy series, which began with A Discovery of Witches in 2011—was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2021, the disease neither slowed her ambitions nor displaced them. Her next book in the All Souls saga, The Black Bird Oracle, publishes next week, but Harkness is already in progress on six additional All Souls books, and five non-All Souls stories—two of which she thinks could wind up as television shows rather than novels. She jokes, with amused self-awareness, “I have a fabulously short attention span and a very low boredom threshold.”
From a chair in her white, window-lit “writing shed” in California, the 59-year-old Harkness holds up the stacks of notebooks she’s filled for each project, including Oracle, and points out how their colored bindings correspond to their subject matter. Despite what she describes as her “crowded mind” and now “90-percent platinum” body, she retains a historian’s meticulousness, a researcher’s intellectual fixation, and a child’s sense of wonder. “My wife said to me [recently], ‘Where are you getting your energy?’” Harkness says. “And I said, ‘I’m alive. My eyes opened this morning. It’s a good day.’”
Harkness argues she is, first and foremost, an academic, and only an “accidental novelist.” Born and raised outside Philadelphia, at 17 she moved to Massachusetts to study at Mount Holyoke College, where she was introduced to magic not as a fictional folly but as a “serious intellectual pursuit.” The class that altered the course of her life was called “Magic, Knowledge, and the Pursuit of Power in Renaissance Europe,” and her professor posed this question to his class: “How do you know what you think you know?” Harkness was hypnotized. In the ensuing years, she used that inquiry to vault into theories of magic and technology, and to analyze historical systems for “understanding the world, and exerting some power and control over it.” She’d go on to become a successful historian, scholar, and professor, but it wasn’t until 2008 that a chance encounter in a Puerto Vallarta airport bookstore led her to her own myth-making.
In Mexico, she stumbled upon a book suggesting magical creatures might be real, and that they lived (mostly undetected) amongst humans. The concept made Harkness wonder, Well, so what if they do? The thought experiment became an obsession: What might a vampire do for a living in the late aughts? What would he pick up at the grocery store? Who’d he trust as friends? Why would he trust them? “And at some point, the answers [to these questions] started coming out as dialogue,” Harkness says. “That’s when I realized, ‘Oh, something different is happening.’”
She started waking up at 5:30 in the morning to write before the start of her day job. It was only after she’d filled more than 100 pages that she told anyone about her secret project. At the time, she’d planned, perhaps, to write one book. “When I got to page 700 of part 1, I realized I was not writing a book in three parts,” she says. “I was writing multiple books.”
Those books would branch out into the All Souls stories, which include A Discovery of Witches, Shadow of Night, The Book of Life, Time’s Convert, and now The Black Bird Oracle. They primarily track the adventures of the historian-witch Diana Bishop and her scientist-vampire partner, Matthew Clairmont, as they navigate an underground network of witches, vampires, and daemons with their own rules and creeds; travel through time; master their superhuman abilities; and grow their own unorthodox family. Initially marketed as the All Souls Trilogy, Harkness’s books have since expanded into a series without any predetermined end. Harkness promises, “As long as the questions keep coming, the books will keep coming.”
The Black Bird Oracle, in particular, addresses fans’ questions about Diana’s paternal ancestors, the Proctors, and their relationship with a more dangerous form of “higher, darker magic.” But the book also probes Harkness’ own questions about womanhood, middle age, and their interplay with power and autonomy.
“I wanted to explore what happens in a woman’s life when she starts thinking, ‘I’m going to do this. My mother won’t like it. My partner won’t like it. My kids will think I’m crazy, but I really want to…so I’m going to go do it,’” Harkness says. “That’s what the book is about: that moment in a woman’s journey when she begins claiming the things that she wants and needs and that are hers. Not like you do when you’re 18, not like you do when you’re 22 or 30, but what happens around the 40-year mark.” Diana Bishop, Harkness argues, is a particularly strong example of this transformative period, “because she may have lots of gifts, but she’s also a hot mess.”
With each of the All Souls books having debuted on the New York Times bestseller list, and A Discovery of Witches now having been adapted into a three-season television series, Diana and Matthew’s tale has lifted Harkness’s platform well beyond that of many traditional scholars. Despite having never taken a creative writing course, she is now considered one of the most popular fantasy fiction writers of her era. She’s still a historian and professor, currently at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, but her fiction has brought her research the kind of attention it might never have received had she not made up a love story between a witch and a vampire. “I was a successful academic [before All Souls],” she says. “I had a wonderful career as an academic, but I was never invited to talk about books and literacy at the Library of Congress [until] I wrote vampire books. I find that fascinating.”
When I ask why she thinks vampires and, particularly, witches remain such a prominent cultural preoccupation, Harkness doesn’t hesitate. “Witches are very, very ancient, and they’re always intermediaries between human beings, the natural world, and the divine, whatever the divine is,” she says. “Historically, it’s been a woman who is seen to have the power to make those connections. And maybe that explains why women were therefore disempowered legally, socially, in all kinds of other ways—because they had such enormous power. It was fine for men to devalue that power, call them witches, put them on trial, but it [didn’t] actually do anything to diminish their power, which makes for what we call anxious patriarchs.”
I suggest “anxious patriarchy” seems an apt term to describe modern politics, and Harkness nods. “One would like to think that history is there to give us really important life lessons,” she says, “but I think the anxious patriarchs of the 17th century could be the toxic masculinity culprits of today. I find that alarming.” Still, she adds, “I know very few women who are fully comfortable with the power they have in the world.” The Black Bird Oracle, she hopes, will offer something of a “case study” in that phenomenon.
As for her own power, Harkness has realized the strength of it stems not from any sense of control, but from a newly realized “profound gratitude.” In the wake of her cancer diagnosis and treatment, “there was horrific pain and fatigue and hair loss, and not feeling like myself and wondering if I could even survive the treatment, never mind the disease,” she says. As a self-described “type-A person,” she had to face the reality that she could not will her cancer to disappear, and that it’d remain a chronic condition, a constant presence in her body and her life. But if she could retain her curiosity—the frame of mind that led her to become an academic in the first place—then she could hold fast to the power of her stories. “Every time I remind myself this was an opportunity to learn something, to be something, to do something that I wouldn’t do otherwise.”
And the books do “get finished,” she promises. “But they get finished in their own sweet time.”