Berkeley Author Ayelet Waldman Explores Feminist History in New Novel

BERKELEY & LAMORINDA, Calif. — In a literary profile published Tuesday, November 3, by East Bay Express, Berkeley-based New York Times best-selling author Ayelet Waldman discussed how her new 19th-century novel, A Perfect Hand—published May 19, 2026, by Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House—combines Jane Austen-inspired Victorian comedy with a pointed defense of reading and early feminist organizing.

From Victorian Matchmaking to the Society for the Promotion of Employment for Women

Set primarily in the 19th century, A Perfect Hand centers on Alice Lockey, a lady’s maid serving Lady Jemima Alderwick, and Charlie Wells, valet to Jemima’s suitor, Viscount Nigel Wynstowe. When the 2 (two) servants fall in love, they scheme to steer their aristocratic employers into marriage so they can remain together and build financial equity for their own future.

What began as a lighthearted pastiche paying tribute to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice evolved into an exploration of how literacy and books transform Alice from a domestic servant into a women’s rights activist. While wrestling with early drafts, Waldman moved the narrative 50 years forward in time—a structural shift after which she "got Alice" and said writing felt "like getting on a Japanese bullet train."

"Words and reading matter? I’ve never articulated it that way, but I love that idea. Yes, hell yes," Waldman told interviewer Lou Fancher. "Writers don’t have anything in common other than they were all readers as children. Peculiarly, novels rarely have characters who read. I knew Alice would be a reader, but as her character took shape in my mind, that became an indelible part. Perfect Hand is almost a defense of reading."

Blending Satire of Aristocratic Pseudo-Science with Real Suffragette History

Throughout the novel, fictional characters such as Alice and Emmeline—an administrator at the historical Society for the Promotion of Employment for Women—intersect with real figures including Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. Waldman balances the weight of 19th-century social reform with satirical Victorian details, including a chapter in which Lord Wynstowe uses calipers to take facial measurements in an effort to prove the superiority of upper-class aristocrats over middle- and lower-class men while excluding women altogether.

Connecting 19th-century class and gender hierarchies to contemporary civic life, Waldman critiqued the "Great Man theory" of history, noted her admiration for Barack Obama, and lamented that "wretchedly poor education in the average history class" leaves many Americans unfamiliar with the suffragette movement or the causes of World War I (1). A social rights activist, mother of 4 (four) adult children, and spouse of novelist Michael Chabon, Waldman is also the author of the Mommy-Track Mystery series, co-creator of Netflix’s Unbelievable, and co-editor of Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons and Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation.