Berkeley-based author Ayelet Waldman is like the suffragettes and early feminists she came to admire while writing her new novel, A Perfect Hand (Knopf, 2026). A New York Times best-selling author, Waldman is clever, articulate and blessed with the determination to express unusual insights through multiple publishing outlets.
Waldman has written novels, nonfiction, the Mommy-Track Mystery series and a memoir about modern motherhood sparked by a controversial New York Times article. She co-created Netflix’s Unbelievable and co-edited Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons and Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation. A social rights activist, she is the mother of four adult children and married to novelist Michael Chabon.
A Perfect Hand is a novel set primarily in the 19th century. Alice Lockey, a lady’s maid in a Victorian household, serves Lady Jemima Alderwick. When Alice meets Charlie Wells, valet to Jemima’s supposed suitor, Viscount Nigel Wynstowe, the two servants fall in love and try to steer their aristocratic employers into marriage. Success would allow them to remain together while building equity toward their future.
Cloaked in Victorian culture, Waldman’s Jane Austen-esque novel is laugh-out-loud funny and historically educational.
In an interview, Waldman responded to the suggestion that the novel asserts written words that can change history, society and human lives. Alice’s eventual transformation from lady’s maid to women’s rights activist is rooted in reading, and leads to surprising climactic scenes.
“Words and reading matter? I’ve never articulated it that way, but I love that idea. Yes, hell yes,” Waldman said. “Writers don’t have anything in common other than they were all readers as children. Peculiarly, novels rarely have characters who read. I knew Alice would be a reader, but as her character took shape in my mind, that became an indelible part. Perfect Hand is almost a defense of reading.”
Well-crafted writing about people and substantive topics is a natural corollary. Establishing and maintaining characters’ voices, she said, “is everything.” While wrestling the novel through early drafts, capturing Alice’s voice was a cycle of search and struggle. After moving the story 50 years forward in time, Waldman finally “got Alice.” From that moment on, writing felt “like getting on a Japanese bullet train.”
Improbably, A Perfect Hand began as a lighthearted Jane Austen pastiche paying tribute to Pride and Prejudice. Waldman credits Austen’s novel, and the librarian who recommended it, with “changing everything about me as a reader and showing me that writing and reading are about the delights of beautiful, real prose and the joy of a writer’s imagination.”
An underlying theme is the mismeasurement of women—and men. In one chapter, Lord Wynstowe fixates on facial measurements, using calipers to prove the superiority of upper-class aristocrats over middle- and lower-class men and male servants. Tellingly, his investigation doesn’t include women.
Waldman readily connects the injustices of Alice’s time to the modern world. “It’s the Great Man theory of the way history is transformed,” she said, pointing to the figure in the White House, whose wealth and “profound immorality” have enabled him to change the world “in the worst way.”
Pivotal figures aren’t always villains, though they receive the most attention. Waldman admires Barack Obama but believes he didn’t become the change-maker many expected. She also protests Americans’ ignorance of history, blaming what she calls “wretchedly poor education in the average history class.” Most people, she said, don’t know about women suffragettes or what caused World War I.
In the novel, fictional feminist figures and real people, organizations and events play major roles. Alice and Emmeline, an administrator for the Society for the Promotion of Employment for Women, are fictional; Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill and the society itself belong to history.
The weight of feminist history is balanced by Waldman’s delight in Victorian peculiarities, from Lady Jemima’s lethally stinky feet to obsessions with “perfect white hands” and extravagant parties. “I love writing about crinolines, not wearing one. I like reading about parties, not going to them,” she said. Letting the humor loose, she added, “was ecstasy.”
With each book, Waldman strives for more complex characters, an authentic sense of place and time, and prose in which every element “does its job.” Plot, imagination and pacing don’t emerge through “woo-woo” magic, but hard work. A book that offers both engagement and depth requires research, contemplation, beautiful writing and imagination—plus one final, back-to-reality necessity: access to publication.
Ayelet Waldman’s novel ‘A Perfect Hand’ was published on May 19, 2026, by Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House.
