Laurie Lico Albanese

Laurie Lico Albanese places imagined lives beside the gaps and silences of literary history. Hester follows Isobel Gamble, a Scottish seamstress who reaches Salem in 1829 and meets Nathaniel Hawthorne, recasting the possible origins of The Scarlet Letter through a woman’s perspective. St. Martin’s Press published the historical novel in 2022. Albanese has written three novels and a memoir, with earlier work that includes Stolen Beauty and Blue Suburbia. Her background also spans journalism, book publishing and creative-writing instruction. She studied journalism at New York University and later earned an MFA through the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast programme. Research, place and the choices available to women under social constraint shape much of her fiction.