Insider Secrets about Cornelia

Insider Secret No. 1

Many of the places that appear in Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters are real places in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village:

1.  Magnolia Bakery sits on the corner of West 11th Street and Bleecker Street.  This is where Cornelia buys the beautiful cupcakes that she uses to ‘tame’ Mister Kinyatta the French bulldog in the beginning of the book.  Until recently, the Biography Bookshop (where Cornelia finds her dictionaries and makes friends with the store’s owner) sat right across the street.

2.  Westville, the cafe where Cornelia likes to eat french fries and drink root beer after school, is on West 10th Street, between Bleecker Street and West 4th Street.

3. Pastis restaurant, where Cornelia has dinner with her mother and ‘the Howling Dog’ (and has a nasty run-in with a newspaper reporter), sits on the corner of 9th Avenue and Little West 12th Street.

Visit these places yourself during your next visit to New York City, or see them in the Scholastic documentary made about Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters.

Insider Secret No. 2

When Ms. Blume was young, she visited an estate belonging to one of her mother’s friends.  And in many of the rooms of this vast house stood framed, fading old black-and-white photographs of four mysterious ladies - the great-aunts of the home’s owner—having wonderful adventures all over the world, from Hollywood to the Egyptian pyramids.  In each photo, the ladies always wore matching hats. 

Many years later, Ms. Blume would turn the memory of these women into the four Somerset sisters: Virginia, Alexandra, Beatrice, and, of course, Gladys.

Insider Secret No. 3

Like Cornelia, Ms. Blume herself is the daughter of a concert pianist. 

Her mother specializes in Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev, but thinks that “Mozart is the most perfect music in the world.”

Insider Secret No. 4

Mister Kinyatta, the book’s featured and beloved French bulldog, is a dog in real life too.  In fact, he belongs to Ms. Blume.  Click here to see some pictures of him.

Insider Secret No. 5

Many of the audacious escapades of the Somerset sisters were inspired by Ms. Blume’s real adventures around the world.  Ms. Blume kept vivid travel journals wherever she went, and referred to them as she wrote Cornelia. 

Like the Somerset sisters, Ms. Blume visited the ruins of Tintagel (and had a run-in with King Arthur’s ghost), and stayed in a hidden house in Paris’s famous Place des Vosges.  In Morocco, she saw the grisly palace that Moulay Ismail built, whose walls contain the bones of the slaves who died building it, and got accidentally caught up in a wild wedding parade in the ancient souk of Marrakech.

The travel journals sit proudly on Ms. Blume’s living room shelves, next to copies of Cornelia.

Insider Secret No. 6

Virginia Somerset - one of the book’s main characters - a is famous writer.  When creating the character, Ms. Blume devised her name by excerpting the names of two of her favorite authors: Virginia Woolf and W. Somserset Maughum.