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Young author draws on love of Victorian era for 1st novel

Hieber returns to her former stomping grounds to encourage students to write and not give up.

Contributed Photo McGuffey and Miami alum Leanna Renee Hieber reads from her new novel to a group of McGuffey students. Contributed Photo

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By Nancy Averett, Contributing Writer 11:31 AM Thursday, September 24, 2009

As a girl, Leanna Renee Hieber loved theater and ghost stories. She once directed a play at Girl Scout camp in which she portrayed a lovesick teen who hanged herself. To get into character, Hieber smeared purple lipstick around her eyes and slipped a rope around her neck to the delight of her shrieking peers.

“I was always entertaining my friends with spooky stories,” says Hieber, who grew up just outside of Oxford. “This was a recurring theme for me. I would be the first one in high school leading expeditions to the graveyard.”

That early fascination, combined with a passion for the Victorian era, led Hieber to her present success as author of the newly released novel: “The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker” (Dorchester).

Now a New York City resident, Hieber is in Ohio promoting the book at various locales: McGuffey Foundation School, where she spent grades K-8, and Miami University where she majored in theater with a focus on the Victorian era.

“If writing is something you like to do, keep it up,” Hieber urged McGuffey’s students when she visited the school, noting she attempted her first novel at age 12. “It takes a long time, so don’t get frustrated.”

Hieber read an excerpt from “Strangely Beautiful,” which is set in London in 1888, the year of Jack the Ripper, and centers around two characters: an albino orphan who can see and talk to spirits and her relationship with a boarding school professor, who moonlights as a ghost hunter.

Hieber said it took nine years and 18 revisions before she finally sold “Strangely Beautiful” and now is working on a sequel. Publisher’s Weekly recently noted that Hieber shows “great potential,” and Booklist wrote: “Hieber has created a character who will resonate with anyone who has found the beauty in being different.”

She told McGuffey students she’s always loved Victorian England, dressing in flouncy skirts and homemade corsets as a child and that in college, she earned a scholarship to study Shakespearian theater in London.

She also said Percy Parker came to her as an almost ghostly mirage one night when she was especially exhausted; at the time, she was interning with the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, working on five plays at once.

She could not get the image of the albino girl out of her mind so she began scribbling down ideas in a notebook.

“I knew this girl was going to change things,” she says. “I knew somehow when she walked into mind that my life would never be the same.”