Discounts for Spring 2019

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First of all, thanks to everyone who has bought the most recent book in my Victorian San Francisco mystery series, Scholarly Pursuits, and said such nice things about it in comments and reviews. This certainly motivates me to get right back to writing. I am currently doing research on women in the medical professions in San Francisco for the next mystery, while working on the sequel to the novella I co-wrote with my daughter,  The Stars are Red Tonight, which is set in the Paradisi Chronicles universe. And the first two discounts I wanted to tell you about are on Read more…

When Men will be Boys: Masculinity and Late 19th Century Fraternities

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When I started research on my newest book, Scholarly Pursuits, the sixth novel in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, my only agenda was to take some of my series characters across the San Francisco Bay to solve a crime on the University of California campus at Berkeley. I was primarily curious about what life was like for college students in 1881, and since my mystery series focuses on women and their experiences in this period, I assumed I would mostly deal with what life was like for my female characters. (If interested in this topic, see this post.) What I Read more…

Who were the Women Attending Berkeley in 1880-81?

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In Scholarly Pursuits (now available), I set the mystery on the University of California campus at Berkeley during the spring term of 1881. The university, first opened in 1863, didn’t enroll any women until 1870, and between 1874 and 1881, only ten percent of the bachelor’s degrees granted by the university went to women. This is not surprising, given that one of the decade’s most popular books was Sex in Education (1873), a book by Edward Clarke, a Harvard medical school physician, who argued that women who were educated in the same fashion as men would face an inability to conceive Read more…

Scholarly Pursuits arrives Tomorrow

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As you can tell, I am excited about the launch of Scholarly Pursuits, the  sixth book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, the first full-length novel since Pilfered Promises came out in July 2017. While I have published two novellas since then, I do know that is a long time for some of you to have waited, and I apologize. But if you pre-order today, the book should show up first thing on your eReaders tomorrow morning, and the print book is already available to order.  Meanwhile, I was just sent the link to this video featuring “Nine Enthralling Read more…

In loco parentis: A comparison of 19th century and 20th century coeducation

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Introduction: I confess, that like many historical fiction writers, I often choose my characters and plots as a way to explore certain subjects. For instance, my primary goal in starting to write my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series was to further explore and tell stories about the women I had studied for my history doctorate. Consequently, during the past ten years I have researched jobs women held in a variety of occupations including domestic service, spiritualism, public school teaching, the printing industry, and department stores. However, while doing the research about public school teaching for Bloody Lessons, the third book in Read more…