The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 1
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Beth Brower on The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 1
In their own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why they wrote it
A detour that became a destinationAfter five novels weighted by fantasy and adventure, Brower needed a change in register. The Deseret News reported that the Emma M. Lion books were conceived as a deliberate relief from heavier emotional terrain, but the format question quickly became its own creative problem, not just a reprieve.
When I set out to write The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, I wanted to give readers a format with a twist. Something fresh. Just a touch different. Also, I wanted Emma to live a large swath of her life with the reader fully taking part. It is a journal, after all. And so I approached the story as if it were a television series.
When a reader asked whether Gilmore Girls had shaped the series, Brower said no and reached back much further, naming the actual tradition she was drawing from. The list is a statement of literary inheritance, not a marketing comparison.
The history of English literature, which infuses scents and color into the world of Emma M. Lion, stands on a long tradition of ensemble casts filled with unique, ofttimes moving, sometimes bizarre, and usually humorous individuals living in memorable places. Think The Canterbury Tales. Think Shakespeare. Think Dickens. Think Austen and Gaskell and the Brontës. Think Cranford and Larkrise to Candleford. Think Wodehouse. Think Eliot.
The answer also clarified where the book’s particular brand of ensemble comedy comes from: Brower points specifically to Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster and to the tradition of British school-story shenanigans for the eccentric secondary characters who crowd Emma’s world.
How they wrote it
Every word a decisionThe series is planned across roughly 23 to 25 volumes, with the first five covering only March through December 1883. Holding that much story in structural order required a model, and Brower reached for one outside prose fiction entirely.
I approached the story as if it were a television series. There are about four seasons of Emma, give or take a volume or three, each ‘season’ comprising a year.
Character creation is, for most novelists, a process of assembly: choose traits, assign backstory, build. Brower rejects that framework entirely. The distinction matters because it explains why Emma reads less like a constructed protagonist and more like a correspondent whose letters have simply arrived.
I don’t base my characters on real people because my characters are real people in their own right. Meaning, they exist. They are. Their decisions, their preferences, their struggles, their lives. I don’t ‘build’ characters, I meet them. And if I’m willing to stay out of their way and listen, I find they fill up the space with their own complicated souls.
The care Brower brings to character extends to individual word choices that carry thematic weight. In a September 2025 Substack post, she explains a grammar pattern that some readers had flagged as an error: Emma’s use of “So-and-so and I” where conventional usage would call for “me.” The explanation turns a copyediting question into a statement about power.
She was standing up and saying I am a person. I am equal. I hold my own. ‘So-and-So and me’ does not have the same visual and rhetorical effect. The word me bends over. Me can grow smaller. And Emma did not grow smaller in Vol. 8. She stood up straighter. She claimed her own.
The architecture of the series also has a long game built in for returning readers. Brower has mapped every character’s trajectory and has shared that map with no one, a fact she reports with a dry precision that feels entirely in the spirit of the books.
I do know everything that happens. With all the characters. I’ve not told ANYONE. I’m considering telling the cat. When readers tell me their thoughts, opinions, or predictions, I smile and try not to give anything away. When the entire series is finished and you reread the volumes, I hope you enjoy the easter eggs.
The personal thread
Siblings, shelves, and the cost of the craftBrower self-publishes through her own imprint, Rhysdon Press, with her sister editing and her brother-in-law designing covers. Asked about that arrangement in the Deseret News, she placed it inside a literary history of creative kinship.
Much like the Brontë sisters had each other, and Virginia Woolf had her sister, I have a lot of talented siblings.
Before Brower was a writer, she was a reader who learned to take risks on unknown books without a guide. In a 2016 blog tour interview conducted while she was promoting an earlier novel, she described the childhood reading practice she calls “the literary gamble,” a phrase that captures the kind of reader she was before she became the kind of writer she is.
It was The Book Closet that taught me the art of the literary gamble. Of holding a book you’d never read, and, without asking anyone, taking it to your windowsill, or into the reading nook you had made in the top of your own closet, and opening to the first page ready to jump off the cliff of another book wondering what voyage the book would take you on and if you would land.
What they want us to sit with
Small power, large lifeThe comedy of Emma’s world is real, but so is the constraint. Brower names that constraint directly in her September 2025 Substack post, placing Emma inside the social geometry of her four central characters and being exact about what that geometry means for a woman in the 1880s.
Among the four of them, Emma is the person with the least power, prestige, monetary capacity, and choice. That’s the reality of female life in the 1880s, even for someone like Emma who bends many a line.
Brower has built a series that is warm and funny and genuinely long, planned across years of Emma’s life that will include real difficulty. When the Deseret News pressed her on how she thinks about difficulty in her writing, her answer was less about craft than about what she believes reading is actually for.
We have to be brave enough to encounter the dark things. Having hope or faith in life requires grit. It requires being honest about the shadows one encounters.
She closes her FAQ with a matching note of honest uncertainty: “I hope you enjoy the journey. It will most certainly be one.” The comedy is the promise; the grit is the cost of keeping it.