SUJATA MASSEY

Sometimes, an idea needs time to incubate until it’s ready to grow. That was the case with Sujata Massey’s series about Perveen Mistry, a woman attorney practicing in India during the 1920s.

- Oline H. Cogdill

Back in 2007, Massey, who is of Indian descent, was researching her standalone novel The Sleeping Dictionary, which explored the maturation of a young woman in 1930s Bengal. That’s when she came across an article about Cornelia Sorabji, the first woman to study law at the University of Oxford and the first female attorney in India, where she began her practice in the 1890s.

“Sorabji wasn’t just the first woman attorney in India, she was the first woman solicitor in the whole British empire,” says Massey, 56, speaking from the Baltimore home she shares with her husband of 30 years, Tony, and their two dogs. Their two children are now in college.

“I thought she sounded like such an interesting person and thought someday, someday, I would like to refer to her in some way, in some book.”

Massey did what many authors often do. She printed out the newspaper story and put it in a folder with other articles, such as one on India’s first female doctor and another on the fashions of time. “I have all these folders. It’s my method of keeping track of details when I’m entering a new world. And for me, then, historical India was a new world I had never written about,” says Massey, the author of 15 novels to date.

About 10 years later, Massey was talking with her agent and an editor at Soho about a possible series set in India when the proverbial lightbulb went off and she remembered the Sorabaji article.

And fact eventually worked its way into fiction.