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Over dinner in London, with her first novel still unsold, Jennifer E. Rizzo’s husband asked what she planned to write next.
“What if I wrote about an autistic character in medieval England?” she recalls answering. He said it sounded interesting but sad. “What if it wasn’t?” she replied.
The result is “Uprising,” Book One of the Fitzjohn Duology, published Sept. 1 by Literary Wanderlust of Denver under the name J.E. Rizzo. Rizzo, who pitched the book to the Independent as a local novelist and reader, recounts the exchange in the novel’s author’s note.
The book follows Blanche Fitzjohn, the illegitimate daughter of John of Gaunt, living as an outcast in the Essex village of Fobbing in 1381. Blanche can hear riders miles away and smell other people’s moods, abilities she hides from everyone except the village wisewoman who trains her as a healer. When her half-brother Henry of Lancaster arrives with news of an arranged marriage to Sir Thomas Prescott, soon to be made Constable of the Tower of London, she accepts, hoping a lady’s influence might ease the lives of villeins like her friend Geoff, a groom at the manor. Within weeks the Peasants’ Revolt reaches London and the Tower.
A name found in a ledger
Rizzo writes that she first met Blanche in a single sentence of Anya Seton’s novel “Katherine” and found little more in the historical record than entries in Gaunt’s financial accounts: a name, an approximate birth date, a mother, a husband and a dowry. She changed the husband’s real surname, Morieux, to Prescott because, she writes, she had made him “a truly heinous villain” and the real man “might have been a perfectly nice guy.”
Blanche’s character, Rizzo writes, was inspired by her son, who has autism and ADHD; her daughter, who has ADHD and epilepsy; and her own experience as a neurodiverse woman, though the book avoids modern diagnostic labels. “Her name has been virtually unspoken for over six hundred years,” Rizzo writes of Blanche, “and it’s time for that to change.”
The book is dedicated to “Noble Steve, the father who believed in healing through everyday magic.” Rizzo’s father died while she was writing it, according to the acknowledgments, which also credit a ginger cat named Pumpkin with twice trying to delete the manuscript.
Rizzo’s nonfiction has appeared in Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe, The Guardian and Ultrarunning Magazine, according to the release. She won Manuscript Academy’s Agent Choice Award in 2024 and History Inquiry’s 2022 Medieval History Writing Challenge. She works in human resources, has worked as an opera singer, a professional baker and a dog walker, and runs ultramarathons, the release said.
Rizzo noted that a film titled “The Uprising,” also about the 1381 revolt but told from a different perspective, was due in theaters Sept. 11. “No one was more surprised by this coincidence than me,” she wrote.
More information is at jennifererizzo.com.
