The Alice Network
The Alice Network
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Kate Quinn on The Alice Network
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why she wrote it
A career corner forced a discoveryThe Renaissance novel Quinn had planned as her next project was rejected by every publisher her agent approached. Facing a forced pivot with no guarantee of success, she needed an entirely new direction, and the one that eventually arrived changed the course of her career.
After finishing the Empress of Rome series and my Italian Renaissance novels, I wanted to write another Renaissance tale, but no one wanted it—it was refused everywhere, because the era wasn’t popular with readers. I realized I needed to pivot to something fresh and completely different, and that was very scary because a pivot like that has no guarantee of working. But the book that came out of that decision to change lanes was The Alice Network—my breakout book.
The nudge toward the 20th century came from her agent, Kevan Lyon, and arrived as practical advice rather than creative inspiration. Quinn was still attached to a project that wasn’t moving in the market.
I had an idea that I really liked, and we shopped it, but it wasn’t going anywhere. It was a historical era that just wasn’t moving. So, it became an issue of Kevan saying, ‘Well, have you considered doing something a little bit more 20th century, a little bit closer in time?’ That was one of the catalysts that helped me eventually find the idea that became The Alice Network.
Once Quinn was open to a WWI subject, the specific idea arrived through a nonfiction anthology. She had no prior knowledge of the spy ring she stumbled across in one of its essays.
A fantastic non-fiction book called ‘Women Heroes of WWI’ (Kathryn Atwood) sent me down the rabbit hole with an essay about the historic Alice Network, of which I had never heard. As soon as I read about these ladies, I knew I had to write about them!
How she wrote it
French biography, hairpins, and a hidden timeline argumentWWI is now more than a century past, so classified material was not the obstacle Quinn had braced for. Her most valuable single source was a book she could not read without help, a French-language biography written by someone with direct access to the network’s surviving members.
I had a whole host of sources, most invaluable of which was ‘La Guerre des Femmes,’ a biography of Louise de B’s war work written after the war by the journalist husband of her chief lieutenant Leonie van Houtte (who appears in the book as a secondary character). It’s written in French, so I needed help with translation, but it described many of the scenes dramatized in THE ALICE NETWORK.
courtreadsblog.wordpress.com, “Interview with Kate Quinn - Court Reads - WordPress.com”That research consistently dismantled the Hollywood image of espionage. What Quinn found instead was a picture of mundane, grinding vigilance: messages concealed in hairpins and cake boxes, operations that succeeded not through glamour but through repetition across months or years in a war zone.
It’s not a glamorous job. Movies might make you think spying is all couture gowns and cocktail parties and thrilling action, but the reality was boredom and danger; keeping your head down and trying not to be noticed as you gathered and passed intelligence. Spying took a particularly grueling kind of courage: not just nerving yourself up for one dangerous act, but setting yourself to do it over and over and over again, for months and possibly years as you tried to survive in a war zone.
The dual timeline, jumping between 1915 and 1947, was not a structural trick but a historical argument. Quinn used the two time periods to make the case that the trauma of WWI did not dissolve between the wars but carried forward, invisibly, until it surfaced again in the postwar world her second protagonist inhabits.
[paraphrased from audio] Quinn wanted the dual timeline to show that WWI and WWII are more connected than most people assume. Traumas from the first war carried silently through the decades and erupted again in the 1940s, and she saw the two protagonists as a way of making that argument: they begin with nothing in common but come to see that what happened in 1915 is still shaping their lives in 1947.
Placing the real spy ring leader Louise de Bettignies as a secondary character rather than a protagonist was a deliberate choice about where suspense can and cannot live. Quinn recognized that readers can verify a historical figure’s fate at any moment, which drains tension from a narrative built around her survival.
[paraphrased from audio] Quinn described her approach to mixing real and fictional characters: Louise de Bettignies appears as a secondary figure, which means readers can look up her real fate anytime they want. The invented protagonists work differently. There, the reader has no way of knowing what happens, and that is where the tension lives.
This structural decision let Quinn draw on the authenticity of real events while keeping the emotional stakes of her two main characters genuinely open.
What she wants us to sit with
Damage carried home, and women worth rememberingQuinn built the psychological aftermath of espionage into the novel as a historical argument, not just a character detail. She was confident the real women of the Alice Network would have come home with wounds that postwar society had no language for, and she used her protagonist Eve to put that damage on the page.
I’m sure the women of the Alice Network had their own struggles when they returned to ordinary civilian life—I attempted to show that with my heroine Eve, who in the years after the war struggles visibly with alcoholism, nightmares, and flash-backs.
Beyond the individual portrait of Eve, Quinn’s stated purpose for the book is to restore these women to a public memory that erased them. They were celebrated figures in their own time; it was WWII’s dominance over WWI, compounded by a long history of asking women to step back after wartime service, that buried them.
These women defied every rule they were born under, and fought for their countries with extraordinary courage, intelligence, and toughness. They deserved to be remembered—and emulated!