Elizabeth Strout

Eight of her ten planets sit in fixed signs, with one cardinal and one mutable, which is about as concentrated as a chart can be. The elements come out four in water and two apiece in fire, earth and air. Strout is an American novelist and the record names Olive Kitteridge.

The Sun sits at fifteen degrees of Capricorn, built on competence and on having actually done the thing. The Moon, Mars, Saturn and Neptune spread right across Scorpio, which feels everything at depth and shows almost none of it, though her Moon sits on the sixth degree of it at noon, with the sign before it still possible, Libra. Four planets here sit within a degree of a sign boundary: Jupiter on the first degree of Virgo, Uranus on the first of Leo, Neptune on the first of Scorpio and Saturn on the last half degree of it. For a novelist the record fixes to one book, that many planets sitting on thresholds is a detail worth keeping.

Jupiter sits in quiet contact with Uranus three hundredths of a degree from exact, adjacent signs and the mildest link available, and it is the closest thing in the chart by a long way. Jupiter also sits sixty degrees from Neptune at two thirds, generous imagination and real artistic scope, and the Sun sits in hard contact with it at just over half, belief in its own scale meeting a limit. Two T-squares run through the chart and Mercury and Uranus are in both. Jupiter, Uranus and Pluto were the three retrograde planets. In a novelist, imagination that close to the planet of the unexpected is the contact a book actually gets finished under.

Saturn came back to its Scorpio birth degree on 9 September 2015, at fifty nine, a second return rather than a first, with Jupiter closing its own lap three weeks earlier on 15 August. Scorpio puts no weight at all on what was announced, which for a writer whose subject is what people do not say is the measure that recognises it. Eight fixed planets, in a writer whose record is a single title, is the thing to carry out of this chart.