Writing the Love Story of Sir Walter Scott

Josi S. Kilpack

On Thursday 14th September 2017 we had a talk by Josi S. Kilpack. She was introduced by our Chairman, Prof. Peter Garside

Josi S. Kilpack hated to read until her mother handed her a copy of The Witch of Blackbird Pond when she was 13. From that day forward, she read everything she could get her hands on and credits her writing “education” to the many novels she has “studied” since then.

She began writing her first novel in 1998 and has written thirty-three novels, one cookbook, and several short stories since then. She is a four-time Whitney Award winner, including two Novel of the Year awards for Lord Fenton's Folly and As Wide as the Sky and a Best of State winner in Fiction.

She writes her national women's fiction under the pen name of Jessica Pack (say Josi Kilpack really fast and you'll see why she chose it). Josi currently lives in Northern Utah and is the mother of 4 wonderful kids.

Synopsis: Many scholars and readers believe that Sir Walter's Scott never overcame the heartbreak he felt when Williamina Stuart chose his friend, William Forbes, and that his unrequited love was played out in his novels. While no reader can deny how well he captures the loss of love in his literary works, Scott did overcome the rejection and go on to have a solid marriage with Charlotte Carpenter, a catholic-born Frenchwoman with a family history shadowed in scandal. My book, Lady of the Lakes, follows both love stories--the one lost and the one found--and attempts to capture the influences of both women on the man and the writer Sir Walter Scott would become. Though some fictional license was taken to create a full story, chapter notes show where I used fact and where I inserted fiction to create the expected arc of the story. I am not a scholar, but I am a storyteller and tried to capture these people in hopes to give some legacy to the lives they lived and the influence they had on the world we live in now.