BROWN: I think that there is very little that would be too grim for me. I’ve always been fascinated by the gory and grotesque. But we had to be careful when presenting some of this to the general public, who might not share in Adele and my morbid obsessions. The battlefield casualties, the soldiers’ deathbed letters home, the suffering of the wounded and the on-the-field surgeries—we could have made this story very different, tonally. But it is primarily a ghost story, not a war story. Ghost stories tend to be more about a frisson of fear and less about blood and guts. And of course, there is the romance.

ETC: A gothic, illustrated ghost story is an unusual idea. Did you go into this story with one idea, and change any plans midstream?

GRIFFIN: We did. We killed off a character we loved, who wasn’t doing anything for the narrative. And while we knew there would be a strong visual component, the idea of framing the illustrations as a scrapbook was not on the table immediately. It just became intuitive, as we went along, that Jennie would be the one choosing and pasting and creating this book-within-the-book. And then Lisa began to create pieces of art, along with the portrait illustrations, that were more intimate to a young girl’s keepsakes, such as Jennie’s dance card and the dinner menu from the Harvard ball.
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