Maeve Campbell

About the Author , Maeve Campbell After Dark Edition ________________________________________ Maeve Campbell is a Bronx-born storyteller with Irish roots, a Roosevelt Island walk-up, and a body of work that lives, like most interesting women, in two registers. Under her own name she writes the historical and contemporary romances readers have come to know her by , lyrical, big-hearted, queer-and-straight-friendly novels of love defying propriety in Victorian London, post-war Dublin, and the dive bars of Queens. Under the Maeve Campbell After Dark imprint, she writes the books she used to keep in the bottom drawer. Raised by immigrant parents in a household where folklore, laughter, and the occasional dramatic kitchen monologue formed the daily weather, Maeve learned young that the best love stories come with their darker counterparts , the ones whispered after the pub closed, the ones the aunts traded in the kitchen when the children had gone to bed. Now in her mid-forties, she lives between the buzz of Manhattan and the quiet hum of the East River with two opinionated cats and a soulful rescue named Cale, works by day as a production assistant at a television studio, and by night writes the kind of women's fiction that explores, with steady eyes, what her daytime novels only allow themselves to imply. The After Dark books are the work of a woman who has stopped pretending she is curious only on her characters' behalf. Maeve has, over a long and patiently lived adult life, come to know her own tastes , for the slow, the controlled, the sapphic, the unhurried; for the kind of intimacy that uses a hairbrush or a length of silk cord; for the language of consent, surrender, and the kindly held line. She does not write BDSM as transgression or as confession. She writes it as one of the dialects in which adult love is conducted, with the same lyrical attention and emotional intelligence she brings to a Victorian ballroom or a Dublin tenement. Her characters in this imprint are women who have, finally, taken themselves seriously enough to ask what they actually want. The Maeve Campbell After Dark imprint is unapologetically queer-centered, female-disciplinarian-centered, and centered on the slow careful exploration of power exchanged between consenting adult women. Maeve's interest in this territory is at once literary and personal. Literary, because the great underground tradition of 19th-century erotic writing , The Pearl, the Romance of Lust, the long Victorian flagellant pamphlets , is, beneath its Victorian veneer, one of the earliest sustained literatures of female sexual agency, and one she has been quietly translating into the modern register for a decade. Personal, because Maeve writes most honestly about the things she has herself, in her own private life and in her own kitchen-table conversations with the women she loves, made her peace with wanting. Outside the writing she remains, as her regular bio has it, a social creature with a sharp wit and a soft heart, a regular at her neighborhood pub, and the kind of woman whose flirtations , sometimes with friends, sometimes with benefits, always with boundaries , keep her notebooks well stocked. She is, in the After Dark hours, a little more frank about which side of the bench she has, in any given month, preferred to be on. She believes a woman in her forties who has not yet worked out what she wants in bed has not been listening; and that one who has worked it out and refuses to say so on the page is doing a quiet disservice to the women coming up behind her. Maeve firmly believes that erotic fiction , all erotic fiction, but especially the kinds women have been told not to write , is resistance, reclamation, and radical joy. The Maeve Campbell After Dark novels are written for adult readers who already know that desire is not a problem to be solved but a country to be visited; that submission can be a form of authority and authority a form of tenderness; and that the woman who knows, at last, what she is, is the most dangerous and the most generous creature in any room she walks into. She is presently at work on the second book in the After Dark line. It is set in the same world as The Pembury Confessions, and she is enjoying it more than is probably decent.