97-02-14: AUTHOR'S VISION OF JOAN OF ARC REALIZED IN NEWLY PUBLISHED NOVEL ON SAINT'S LIFE By Rebecca Arrington A recurring image that dwelled in Pamela Marcantel's thoughts for six months some six years ago has come alive in her first published novel, "An Army of Angels: A Novel of Joan of Arc." "I have no idea why she began cropping up in my mind," said Marcantel of the young French martyr, who appeared to the author dressed in soldier's armor. "Despite a lifelong love of history ... and a particular fascination with Medieval Europe, I knew almost nothing about Joan of Arc" - or Jehanne the Maid, as she's referred to in the novel. Claiming she was visited by angels, Joan led an army against the English to restore Charles VII's throne, was burned at the stake for heresy and canonized five centuries later. "I knew I needed to embrace her," said Marcantel, the undergraduate administrator in the English department. However, "I didn't want to make her a plaster saint or a schizophrenic feminist, but a real, flawed person.Ó Her embrace has produced a 578-page historical novel - "the first one I know of written from her point of view," said Marcantel - to be released March 1 by St. Martin's Press. The book broke the author's 20-year hiatus from writing and is garnering praise from reviewers, academics and lay readers. "Historical fiction of the best kind: intelligent, lively and persuasive" is how Kirkus Reviews characterized the novel. C. Brian Kelly, a lecturer in newswriting at U.Va., wrote, "great scenes interwoven with historical fact - a wondrous tapestry is the final result." The 47-year-old Marcantel grew up in a French Catholic family in her native Louisiana. As a child, she wrote poetry and short stories. Later, while attending the University of Southwestern Louisiana, she wrote her first novel, "The Rainbow Builder," about a group of bohemian artists living in the French Quarter. "I kept sending it out and got form-letter rejections. I got very discouraged and quit writing for 20 years," said Marcantel, who destroyed her early writings at that time. The two-decade lapse was a period of "breathing in," she said. "I read a lot, mainly non-fiction - history, psychology, Eastern mysticism ..." Though she didn't write during this time, she has always considered herself a writer - a profession that requires one not only to read a lot, but to "live a lot," according to Marcantel. She has worked as a house painter, a transcriber in a typistÕs pool, an assistant manager of a ski resort, a bookstore clerk and a gofer for a helicopter company. Marcantel, who moved to Charlottesville and started working at U.Va. in 1986, has worked in her current post since July 1992, handling the "nuts and bolts" of the department's undergraduate program - maintaining student records, overseeing class schedules, putting together course description packets and program booklets. "It's a total coincidence that I wound up in the English department," she said, because the first seven chapters of her novel were already written by then. The "synchronicity has never ceased to amaze me." Marcantel's book required a vast amount of background reading. "Happily, the University has several fine libraries [where] I found a number of excellent historical biographies ... that gave birth to Joan of Arc," she said. "My research was pretty mundane until I went to France" in June 1994, said Marcantel. She and an old friend from Louisiana visited the country on a fact-checking mission, taking the same route Joan of Arc traveled in her lifetime. Call it fate, serendipity, destiny ... But Marcantel's encounters in France are as mystifying as her initial visions of the young saint. Unbeknownst to Marcantel and her companion, the annual Joan of Arc festival was taking place when they arrived in one town. And when they reached their final destination, Rouen, where Joan was burned at the stake, the only hotel with a vacancy turned out to be built on the site of the kingÕs chapel where most of the interrogations of the young woman took place. "When I opened the window in my room, I saw the last remaining piece of what was the Castle of Phillippe Augustus, where Joan of Arc was held prisoner, tried and convicted," she said. "If I had doubted that I was being guided to write the book, all skepticism vanished" following that trip. Another writer friend of Marcantel's, who lives just down the street from her, read the first few chapters of "Joan of Arc," and said, "This is great!" From that point, "each time I finished a chapter, she'd read it and give me feedback." When the manuscript was finished, a graduate student in the English department who had been a literary agent put Marcantel in touch with a former colleague. She liked the story, and following five or six revisions, sent it out to publishers, said Marcantel. After one of the rewrites, George Garrett, Henry Hoyns Professor of English at U.Va., read the work. "He liked it so much, he gave me a bottle of champagne and said 'by all means, pursue publishing,'" recalled Marcantel, laughing. On Sept. 1, 1995 - a date Marcantel rattles off like the birthday of a loved one - her agent called to say St. Martin's Press wanted to obtain publishing rights. Eighteen months later to the day, Marcantel's book is being released. Of her novel's heroine, Marcantel said, "While there have been other soldiers, mystics, populist leaders, strong women and individuals who achieved great things at a young age, only Jehanne the Maid has played all of these roles simultaneously. "It is the mystic who resides at the core of who and what she was," said Marcantel. "Everything else stems from that, from her 'voices' and her relationship with God. After all, had she possessed a more worldly disposition," there might not have been a Charles VII. Having found her own voice, Marcantel plans to continue writing about "those people and events that fascinate me." She won't take as long to 'breathe in' between projects, though. After inhaling a number of histories on the 11th and 12th centuries, Marcantel has already written the first two chapters of her next novel on the First Crusade.