The setup for Francine Prose’s “Five Weeks in the Country” is so ripe with comedic and dramatic elements that it’s hard to believe it’s based on real events.
Imagine a sprawling family with nine kids, all mourning the death of the most recent addition; the brood, which recently relocated from the big city to the country on a whim, is also feeling trapped in the new house. The mother is depressed and unable to bear to participate in daily life. The father, once a cheery, fun-loving dad, has grown remote and apathetic, his interest elsewhere as his marriage stumbles toward its conclusion.
Sign up for our free newsletter about books, authors, reading and more
Add an unexpected houseguest, a big, awkward goof, who, to everyone’s surprise and dismay, doesn’t speak English. Heightening the conflict is the fact that both the host and the guest are world-famous writers, each with a titanic ego. And then the houseguest overstays his welcome by the five weeks of the title, which seems more like forever to the host family.
The characters in the novel are not only based on real people, but they are literary icons. The book is set in 1857 when Hans Christian Andersen came to visit Charles Dickens and overstayed his welcome. Prose tells the story three different ways: first from the perspective of Dickens’ children, then shifting the focus to Dickens, and finally to Andersen. But along the way, as she realized during a recent video interview, she brought elements of her own life to the story to bring this story alive.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Did you know about this visit or learn about it and then research it for the book?
I can’t remember when I didn’t know about it. These are two of my favorite writers, and I’ve been so obsessed with them since I could read as a grown-up. I read yet another Dickens biography, and then I found another one of Andersen, and I wondered, “What could possibly have happened during those horrible five weeks?”
Q: Why did you think it would make for a good novel?
I was thinking about what it means to be a writer or an artist and have a family life at the same time, or to be successful, but questioning the aspects of that success, and to have a guest come and stay forever, and have that growing panic that that person is never going to leave.
Q: Have you had unwanted houseguests?
There was a stretch when people in various states of mental distress would just come and fall apart at our kitchen table. And then we couldn’t ask them to leave. A dear friend of ours, whose girlfriend had just dumped him, was feeling emasculated, and so my husband said, “Take the rototiller and go out to the garden.” But then he dug up all these bulbs for lilies that are just now, a decade later, beginning to come back.
Q: So, Andersen damaging Dickens’ garden comes from your experience?
There’s the way in which you can become passionately involved in the garden and become territorial about it, so if someone messes with it, you never want to speak to them again. Although Dickens was a big fan of red geraniums, which aren’t my favorite. They smell weird.
When Dickens overhears his son Baby chatting with Andersen during storytime, and the child’s painful stutter is gone, Dickens is grateful, at least temporarily, for Andersen’s presence.
30 novels, mysteries, romance and nonfiction books for your June TBR list
It’s just occurring to me now how many things were based on things from my life. I used to teach in the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and a friend had a kid who was a stutterer, and our son, Leon, volunteered to read to the kid at night. The little kid, who couldn’t say his “L’s,” was in awe of our son, who was about 10, and he learned to say “Leon.” But I’m only remembering this now; I didn’t think of it while I was writing.
Also, another thing I hadn’t thought of — poor Catherine, Dickens’ wife, has this habit in the book of making annoying puns, which comes from a student I had once who just drove me insane. She would just shout out puns based on the last thing that people said. It was very disruptive.
Q: Why start with the children’s perspective, and why write in the first-person plural?
The book is about a secret in the family. The children know something has happened or is happening, but they don’t know what; all they know is that their father used to be fun and affectionate and that stopped. I wanted that element about a family brought up at the beginning. And I couldn’t decide which child to choose; it was as simple as that. And I liked the way it worked in Jeffrey Eugenides’ “The Virgin Suicides” and Joshua Ferris’ “And Then We Came to the End.”
Q: Did your sympathies shift with the different perspectives?
I really loved all of them. My heart broke for those kids. You could say Dickens is the villain of the piece because he didn’t treat anyone particularly well, but I understood him so completely. I loved being a mom and raising my kids, but I can remember late Sunday afternoons, after a whole weekend of bad weather, when we were all trapped in the house together, when I was praying for Monday and that school bus to arrive. And what if you had nine kids?
He was really unhappy, and that was kind of the guiding force about his character. He was in what was essentially an arranged marriage because Catherine’s parents had been his publishers. And because he was unhappy, he was given to all these infatuations, the last of which was Ellen Ternan. So, the marriage was ill-fated, and nine children later, he got that it was a bad idea.
Map: 100 Southern California independent bookstores to visit in 2026
Q: Andersen is seen as a bumbling fool from the kids’ and Dickens’ perspective. Did you want that image of him cemented so we’d be forced to reconsider everything once we saw the events from his perspective?
Absolutely. Andersen had sent Dickens a copy of his fairy tales translated into English, and Dickens neglected to show the children. So Andersen arrived, imagining that the children would adore him and his work the way Danish children did. And they had no idea who he was – he was just another guy following dad around, and annoyingly, too.
Also, I found a volume of letters between Andersen and Dickens, a very rare book that was frighteningly expensive. It was clear that Andersen had a translator for his letters, but he doesn’t seem to have admitted that, so Dickens thought Andersen actually spoke English, which he didn’t. And it was a big shock to everybody when he showed up and could hardly speak a word.
But the reveal of Andersen’s perspective is also about how we know so little about other people. For better or worse, these characters are discovering each other or refusing to discover each other at the same time as the reader is discovering them or not discovering them. I hope the reader will be constantly revising their opinions of who these people were.