“Edelweiss refuses to grow anywhere easy.”
They were the words Agatha grew up hearing from her Papa. She longed to be like the flowers:
high in the mountains, untamed and free.Before Maria, before the singing, before the family became legend, there was Agatha, the woman who loved them first. Edelweiss gives that forgotten woman a life of her own, imagining the joys, losses, relationships, and choices that carried her from girlhood to her final days.
Edelweiss: The Novel
Genre
Historical Fiction
Time Period
Salzburg, Austria, spanning from the late 1800s to the 1930s
Stage
It’s in manuscript form…for now!
You’ll Love Edelweiss:
If the final song from
Hamilton makes you weep.
If you’ve ever
recreated this moment.
Or if any of these books have kept you reading past your bedtime:
The Instrumentalist by Harriet Constable
That Churchill Woman: A Novel by Stephanie Barron
The Paris Library: A Novel by Janet Skeslien Charles
Currently seeking representation.
If you root for Elphaba in
Wicked the Musical.
Agathe and Agatha
The woman who inspired this story was real.
Agathe Whitehead von Trapp was the first wife of Captain Georg von Trapp and the mother of the first seven von Trapp children. She has captured my heart for years.
What we know of Agathe reveals a woman who was brave, spirited, and ahead of her time. She loved her husband and her children deeply, and she lived through a period of extraordinary social and political change.
But history can only tell us so much. There are spaces between the facts, questions no record can answer, and a whole inner life that was never written down.
Edelweiss: A Novel follows Agatha von Linden.
Agatha is where history ends and my imagination begins.
