Exclusive Cover Reveal + Q&A: Ava Reid Introduces Us to Her Thrilling New Take on Lady Macbeth

One of the most welcome trends in publishing in recent years has been its embrace of feminist retellings of classic literature, stories that reimagine famous works from female perspectives or that give the women we’ve long been told were afterthoughts on good days, or outright villains on their worst their voices back. From Madeline Miller’s Circe to Genevieve Gornichec’s The Witch’s Heart, this subgenre is home to some of the most rich and fascinating storytelling hitting shelves right now. 

Author Ava Reid has leaned into feminist retellings in the past, incorporating elements of Hungarian history and Jewish mythology into The Wolf and the Woodsman and putting her own spin on the story of The Juniper Tree with Juniper and Thorn. Now, she’ll tackle the story of one of Shakespeare’s most iconic—and perhaps most misunderstood—characters: Lady Macbeth. And while Reid’s take on the Bard’s most famous female character, titled simply Lady Macbeth, promises to have plenty of dark magic and a brooding gothic atmosphere, it is also simply a story of the choices and compromises a woman must make to survive and thrive in a patriarchal environment. (And the reputation such actions inevitably give rise to, whether it’s deserved or not.) 

Here’s how the publisher describes the story. 

The Lady knows the stories: how her eyes induce madness in men.

The Lady knows she will be wed to the Scottish brute, who does not leave his warrior ways behind when he comes to the marriage bed.

The Lady knows his hostile, suspicious court will be a game of strategy, requiring all of her wiles and hidden witchcraft to survive. 

But the Lady does not know her husband has occult secrets of his own. She does not know that prophecy girds him like armor. She does not know that her magic is greater and more dangerous, and that it will threaten the order of the world. 

She does not know this yet. But she will.

Lady Macbeth is set to be released on August 6, 2024, but we’re thrilled to be able to reveal its (absolutely stunning!) cover right now—and get a sneak peek from Reid herself about what to expect from her version of Shakespeare’s story. 

Paste Magazine: Tell us about Lady Macbeth! I think we can kind of guess a little from the title, but what can readers expect from this story?

Ava Reid: Lady Macbeth is a reimagining of Shakespeare’s play, from the perspective of its famous villainess. It’s set in medieval Scotland, but it takes historical liberties—as Shakespeare himself did—in order to craft a world that feels, I hope, as darkly magical as the original.

 My book casts Lady Macbeth as a young bride, married off against her will to the guileful and dangerous Thane of Glammis. His court bristles with suspicion at their lord’s new foreign wife, who is rumored to have the stain of witchcraft upon her.

She moves carefully, subtly accumulating power where she can, while maintaining a mask of innocent fragility. But when she learns that her new husband has supernatural secrets of his own, and an appetite for violence not easily sated, she must call upon her arcane magic—not only to survive, but to transform the very order of the world.

Paste: Lady Macbeth is my favorite character in all of Shakespeare, so I cannot tell you how excited I am for this book! What about her story spoke to you as a writer? What did you want most to change about it? 

Reid: I was inspired just as much by the absence of knowledge as the presence. For such a famous character, Lady Macbeth is remarkably mysterious. We learn nothing of her backstory; we don’t even learn her first name. It’s a testament to Shakespeare’s art that she is a complex and compelling character even without these facts.

It might sound paradoxical, but I chose to portray this obscurity in a very visible way, which is even depicted on the cover: the Lady’s face is covered diaphanously by a veil, though one of her eyes peeks out in what could be an intentional design, or a mere coincidence of the falling cloth.

In addition to giving her a name, a backstory, and a breadth and depth of fears and desires, I wanted to honor the enigmatic nature of her legacy. My Lady is calculating, chameleonic, conflicted—and, at times, obscure even to herself. 

Paste: What, if anything, did you want to make sure you kept from Shakespeare’s version of her character? 

Reid: Lady Macbeth’s most well-known traits are her ambition and her wiles, and I wanted to be sure to retain those, as they’re so essential to her character. Equally important to me was the feminist reading of her character—her gender is crucial to the way she exercises power and agency within the narrative, and crucial to the way she articulates and understands her own identity (the “unsex me here” monologue is so famous for a reason!)

This is an irrepressibly feminist novel about a woman exerting herself within a bleakly patriarchal environment. These seeds are in Shakespeare’s play; I like to think of my book as coaxing them out of the earth and cultivating their strange flowers. 

Paste: What is the most intriguing or weirdest thing you can preview for us about this story? What will readers be surprised to find in it?

Reid: When I set myself the rather ambitious task of “telling Lady Macbeth’s story,” I wanted it to feel, in some sense, like it was the way a young woman of the time would articulate her own narrative. So I read a lot of medieval chivalric romance, specifically Marie de France’s lais—the idea being that this is the literature my protagonist would read and she might then emulate some of its qualities when telling her story.

Thus, many themes, motifs, and symbols common in chivalric romance have made their way into Lady Macbeth. The most prominent—and probably the most unexpected—is the romance itself, something that isn’t present in Shakespeare’s play.

(I also hope readers will be pleasantly surprised by the presence of dragons).

Paste: How would you say that Lady Macbeth compares to your earlier novels like A Study in Drowning or Juniper and Thorn? 

Reid: In quintessential Ava Reid fashion, Lady Macbeth is a work of gothic, feminist fiction. It opens with the contrivance of a gothic novel: a young woman arrives at the mysterious home of a sinister, capricious lord and must uncover the dark secrets—both mortal and supernatural—lurking within. It is about the entrenched, multifold violence of patriarchy. 

However, it’s much more of an intimate character study than my previous work. The story is called Lady Macbeth, and Lady Macbeth is the story.

Lady Macbeth won’t hit shelves until August 6, 2024, but you can pre-order it right now.

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB