“It was nothing special to be fearless and intrepid,” the heroine of Virginia Pye’s marvelous new novel, “The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann,” concludes, but the author could easily be talking about herself. The former Richmonder is in town this week to launch her fourth book to a local literary community that’s been rooting for her since her days here as head of James River Writers.

After years of numerous rejections starting when she was 27, Ginny didn’t publish her first book, “River of Dust,” until she was 53 years old. Her key strategy in the face of setbacks, she has explained, was to keep writing — not unlike Mrs. Swann, who must persevere as well, in this case as she attempts to find her voice and path following devastating losses at the hands of bad men. Some would call this very fearless and extremely intrepid.

There are loads of reasons to love the new book, notably its impressive, meticulous attention to Gilded Age culture, history, costumes and customs. The period comes alive with the appearance of Alice Longfellow on Brattle St.; Martha Washington, lonely and alone before her glory days; the tedious Ladies Book and Travel Club; the popular dime novel; the gentlemen’s club reminiscent of a certain musty male bastion here in town. Ginny gives us an unflinching look at a world chillingly familiar, with banned books (you may recall the Comstock Act that outlawed Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”), back-alley abortions, opium dens and an oppressive, controlling patriarchy, along with gentle reminders about true friendships, honorable work partnerships and the power of purpose.

Look for choice observations like, “How astoundingly delicate oversize men could be,” or, how the manuscript was “dropped in the drawer like a dead body in a shallow grave.”

Style Weekly recently spoke with Pye and the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Style Weekly: Did your thinking about the book begin with a woman in trouble who had to solve something or was this to be a work about book publishing in the Gilded Age?

Virginia Pye: I think it was about that incredible feeling of being in this particular area, of walking around Cambridge, Massachusetts, and feeling the shadows of all these great literary figures. And I saw all these people reading. Reading on the bus. In their cars when they’re at a red light. Reading on the subway. I actually saw someone walking down the street, reading. Who are these people who are reading all the time? It felt different than other places. And where I live are all these historical markers to literary figures, on the homes where they once lived, as a way of honoring them, yet few of them recognize women writers. I started to think about what it might be like to be a woman writing in that era, in the middle of those men, and not necessarily writing the types of things that they were writing.

Did you know Victoria’s life would come crashing down in such a devastating way? It was shocking.

Things happen in books! It’s a funny thing because it’s a book that starts out backwards, first with an internal problem. Victoria wants to be a different kind of writer than she is. She wants to tell her own personal life story, the hardships she faced as a young woman. Instead, she’s being paid a lot of money and her publisher and husband are counting on her to write these adventure novels, these romance novels that she’s getting sick of writing. That’s not exciting, it’s an internal problem, and you can’t dramatize that, so how do you take something that’s happening in in someone’s mind and turn it into something dramatic? I had to figure out how a personal decision would make a life go haywire.

This is an obvious question but are you and Victoria very similar? You must have related to her on a number of levels.

I did, I did. I’ve never written a story about a writer before. I never indulged in that and I feel like maybe every writer gets to do that once — but shouldn’t make a habit of it. This is a story about someone where the arc of their life is intimately tied to the arc of their writing life. The path she takes in life is dictated by what she ends up writing. And I love that idea, that the two are intertwined. That resonates with me because that’s how it’s been in my life. It is my attempt to try to show the portrait of a woman as a maturing writer.

Your story as a published author is pretty remarkable. A lot of people would have given up at age 40. Maybe age 50.

I had my first agent at 27 and my debut novel was five books and three agents later, at age 53, and then I published four books in the ten years since. The dam burst, which is awesome. I also raised two kids at that time.

Was Victoria’s treatment by unseemly gentleman-publisher types part of your own experience or is it observational?

I’ve ended up writing a more personal essay than I usually write that’s going to be coming out in Literary Hub about a young writer having some male domination in the household and also being the youngest sibling. There’s an element of this and of a woman finding her voice. She’s up against stiff odds, with the men closest to her underestimating her, trying to take advantage of her. It’s also how women writers were characterized and expected to write then. There are exceptions like Margaret Fuller, but even Louisa May Alcott wrote dime novels to support herself before “Little Women.”

I noticed that the good guys in the book are mainly the gay guys.

Oops.

This is a feminist book.

It’s definitely a feminist book, on a personal level and in terms of the industry and how women have been getting the short end of the stick. It still exists today, although I think younger women have figured it out. Younger women seem to be standing up more than my generation. There are so many battles on so many fronts.

Who were your early feminist heroines?

My sister Lyndy. She’s 10 years older, and was an avowed feminist in the ‘70s. I vividly remember when she took me to see “When Colored Girls who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” [a 1976 work of poetic monologues by Ntozake Shange]. I ended up going once with her, once with a friend, and I took my parents. It was a voice that spoke to me. Lyndy introduced me to that.

Author Virginia Pye will be appearing from Oct. 6 through Oct. 8 at the James River Writers Conference in the Greater Richmond Convention Center. Go here for more information. And she will be at Reynolds Gallery, 1514 W. Main St. on Saturday, Oct. 7 5:30 p.m. for a signing.