Victoria Shorr

About the Author

Victoria Shorr has been compared to John O’Hara, Henry James, Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Her first book, Backlands, was named one of Booklist’s top-ten first novels of 2016. The Plum Trees, was listed as a New York Times Recommended Historical Fiction selection for 2021. Midnight, “a flamboyant display of empathy and wit,” where “the line between fact and fiction seems to disappear,” tells the stories of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and Joan of Arc. Mid-Air was called a “ minor masterpiece” in the Wall Street Journal.

None of these books would have come to light had they not gotten over the transom of Starling Lawrence, the late and legendary Editor-in-Chief at W. W. Norton. He published Backlands in 2015, when Shorr was in her sixties.

Not that she started writing late—just that she somehow couldn’t get her work out there. There was that long bad spell when—well, when she would walk in the Santa Monica mountains, telling herself that posthumous publication had been good enough for The Leopard. For The Master and Margarita. Good company, but cold comfort, that.

But what kept her going was the social activist Kool-Aid she had drunk in the 60’s and 70’s. So that when nothing was working in her own life, “when every turn, every choice, seemed like—had been—the wrong one,” she could still wake up in the morning to that dream. To the pressing need for being not “part of the problem,” as Eldridge Cleaver put it, but “part of the solution.”

She had moved to L.A. after 10 years in Brazil, straight into the Clarence Thomas hearings. Shocked by the all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Committee’s slo-mo lynching of Anita Hill, “I don’t think I can live in this country,” she said to her mother.

“Do something,” her mother said to her.

Figuring that a progressive girls’ school was the quickest way to get a diverse group of women onto that Committee, she started asking everyone she met, “Do you want to found a girls’ school?” L.A. said yes, and in 1995, the Archer School for Girls opened its doors [https://www.archer.org]. Twenty years later, Shorr co-founded the Pine Ridge Girls School [https://pineridgegirlsschool.org], to offer the same kind of progressive, empowering education to Lakota girls, just up the road from the Wounded Knee massacre site.

Like her books, the schools are linked by a re-envisioning, in this case of what education looks like, for girls in L.A. and those on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Shorr is now based in New York. She is married to writer/film maker John Perkins, and has three children and six grandchildren.