Victoria Shorr

About the Author

Someone asked a friend at a dinner the other night for Victoria Shorr’s address.

“She doesn’t have one,” the friend replied.

Though lacking a room of her own, 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. Her third novel, The Plum Trees, was listed as a New York Times Recommended Historical Fiction selection for 2021. Her second book, Midnight, tells the stories of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and Joan of Arc in ways that haven’t been written till now.

Since women like Shorr haven’t been writing till now. They haven’t lived long enough. They died in childbirth. They were denied the pen and the page, denied even the language. They stood at stoves and in fields and barnyards or formal parlours from morning till night, with no chance to think beyond the next meal—theirs to cook.

But Shorr came of age through the turbulence of the sixties and seventies, through the anti-war and feminist movements, with those dreams of justice and equality almost within reach. This has led to the second plank in her life—the activism that led to the founding of the Archer School for Girls in L.A. in 1995, and the Pine Ridge Girls School, in 2016, the first independent, Lakota college-prep school in America.

Like her books, the schools are linked by the kind of re-envisioning of established stories that her perspective has allowed her—that of a restless, inspired believer.

She lived in Brazil for ten years, then moved to Los Angeles, and currently is based in New York.

 She is married to writer/film maker John Perkins.