"I call this the house that Ahab's Wife built," Sena Jeter Naslund says with a laugh, walking into the kitchen of her 1901 Victorian home in Old Louisville to prepare a pot of tea.

Naslund's comment is pretty accurate. Before writing Ahab's Wife, the 1999 bestseller about the fictional wife of Ahab (of Moby-Dick fame), Naslund was modestly successful, having published four books with independent presses, founded the Louisville Review and held a distinguished teaching professor post at the University of Louisville. But things change when you sign on with a big publishing house like William Morrow, write a critically acclaimed, bestselling novel (Ahab's Wifewas longlisted for the Orange Prize and has 500,000 trade paperback copies in print) and follow it with a book of equally impressive breadth (Four Spirits, published by Morrow in 2003, centered on the civil rights movement). Since the publication of Ahab's Wife, Naslund's confidence (and finances) have soared, and she hasn't stopped: this fall will see the publication of perhaps her most ambitious project yet: Abundance, a novel about the notorious Marie Antoinette.

Naslund's early works were story collections and short novels, nothing like the colossal narratives of Ahab's Wife, Four Spirits or the forthcoming Abundance—each of which run about 600 pages. "Ahab's Wife was a breakout book for me commercially, but also artistically," Alabama-born Naslund says. "What it meant to me was that I could successfully handle a very big subject. And at the same time, these books would be intimate studies of the inner lives of the characters."

Although Naslund may not have felt experienced or self-assured enough earlier in her career to write a lengthy fictional work on the life of the infamous queen of France, the idea had been with her for a long time. She first heard of Marie Antoinette when she was a child. "It was a terrifying story to me," she says, "that a person could be in this position of privilege, prestige and power, and end up losing her head." The story resurfaced when Naslund came across Stefan Zweig's Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman, which Naslund found to be quite critical. (Although there's no evidence Marie Antoinette actually said, "Let them eat cake," the queen has long been dogged by a negative image.) Intrigued, Naslund researched further, living for a month in the town of Versailles, and developing her own opinion of Marie Antoinette. "I began to see her as a tragic figure," says Naslund. "She did have some wonderful qualities, but she was deeply flawed, and she paid for it with her life."

Naslund's novel is being published amid a confluence of artistic interest in Marie Antoinette. Abundance(first printing: 100,000) goes on sale October 1; Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, starring Kirsten Dunst, opens October 20; a PBS documentary airs in October; and Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (Holt) and Moi and Marie Antoinette, a children's book from Bloomsbury, are both due this fall.

Naslund, who still teaches at the University of Louisville and Spalding University (also in Louisville), is enjoying her fame and the opportunities it affords her. In 2005 she was named Kentucky's poet laureate, and Four Spirits was recently adopted by a local college as required reading for all incoming freshmen. Yet Naslund remains grounded. Small presses gave Naslund her start (her first four books were published by the now-defunct Ampersand Press and David R. Godine) and she continues to support that area of publishing. Ten years ago, Naslund founded Fleur de Lis Press to help writers whose work appears in the Louisville Review to publish first novels or poetry collections. "We're a stepping-stone press," Naslund says. "Ampersand served that function for me. I like giving back to the community of writers by trying to help other people get started."

Naslund's generosity is evident in her writing, too: "I want to write books that have a richness to them," she says, "so it's not just an escape for the reader, but that the reader comes back with some insight—something that's worth having."