Guest post by The Thirteenth Husband author Greer Macallister
Raised in the Midwest, Greer Macallister earned her MFA in creative writing from American University. Her historical novels, including The Magician’s Lie, Girl in Disguise, Woman 99, and The Arctic Fury, have been named Book of the Month, Indie Next, LibraryReads, Target Book Club, and Amazon Best Book of the Month picks and optioned for film and television. As G. R. Macallister, she is the author of the Five Queendoms series, which Paste Magazine called “the best feminist fantasy series you probably haven’t read yet.” A regular contributor to Writer Unboxed and the Chicago Review of Books, she lives with her family in Boston.
About The Thirteenth Husband: Based on a real woman from history, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo meets HBO’s The Gilded Age with a haunting twist in this fictional tell-all narrated by the glamorous Aimee Crocker, revealing everything from her mischievous days in German finishing school to dinners with Hawaiian royalty to lavish Astor parties in Manhattan. But behind Aimee’s public notoriety, there’s private pain.
Historical novels spring from many different inspirations, but some of my favorites center on the lives of extraordinary women. It’s that fascination that led me to choose Aimee Crocker, globetrotting heiress and tabloid queen, as the subject of my new novel The Thirteenth Husband. Perhaps today an heiress getting tattoos, spending millions, and marrying and divorcing a succession of younger and younger husbands wouldn’t ruffle that many feathers, but in the 1880s? Oh so scandalous.
When you think of women thumbing their noses at society’s rules, you might think first of the flappers of the 1920s, but the Gilded Age has its own cadre of women who outraged their neighbors by living by rules of their own. Here are a few books starring real-life rebels of that period.
The Engineer’s Wife by Tracey Enerson Wood
Fans of the TV show “The Gilded Age” might have been surprised by a subplot in the show’s second season when one of the characters can’t seem to meet in person with the engineer of a major construction project: the Brooklyn Bridge. He can only talk to the engineer’s wife, Emily Roebling. Turns out that the engineer is unable to work after a major injury and the design and construction is taking place under the direction of Emily herself. The real-life Emily not only took on this major role, but eventually became the public face of the project, driving the first carriage across the completed bridge, accompanied by a rooster for luck. Wood’s novel follows Emily’s life from her first glimpse of her future husband through the bridge-building and beyond.
The Mad Girls of New York by Maya Rodale
One of the boldest figures of the 1880s and 1890s was Elizabeth Cochrane, better known by her chosen pen name Nellie Bly. Her exploits would have been outrageous for any investigative journalist of the day, let alone a “girl reporter” — she not only infiltrated notorious insane asylum Blackwell’s Island to expose the terrible conditions there, she also undertook a very real race around the world in an attempt to break the fictional record set by the character Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. (She made it in 72.) Rodale’s novel puts Nellie’s days in the asylum front and center.
The Lioness of Boston by Emily Franklin
Isabella Stewart Gardner’s name is well-known in Boston for her namesake museum that still stands today, but the choices she made during her lifetime set Gilded Age tongues wagging. After a series of tragic losses, she fled to Europe and discovered a new path to healing: the enjoyment of art. In the 1880s and 1890s she collected vast stores of fine art from Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East, and after her husband’s death in 1898, she pursued their shared dream of building a museum to house and display these treasures. Franklin’s novel intimately describes Isabella’s grief and longing in her darkest days as well as her passion for life and fiery spirit.
I Always Loved You by Robin Oliveira
Mary Cassatt made a name for herself as an Impressionist painter in Paris, but she was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. Her tenacity and talent helped her succeed in a world that wasn’t always welcoming to woman artists. She never married nor had children, though her paintings of mothers with children have had the most lasting fame. Oliviera’s novel focuses on Cassatt’s relationship to fellow Impressionist Edgar Degas, depicting a romantic love that may or may not have existed between the two, though historical records show they worked closely together for years and certainly influenced each others’ work.
A Well-Behaved Woman by Therese Anne Fowler
Caroline Astor absolutely ran the elite social scene in 1880s New York, but as the “new money” families she disdained gained strength, figures like Alva Vanderbilt challenged her supremacy. The TV show “The Gilded Age” uses a fictional figure, Bertha Russell, to represent the new money contingent, but in real life it was Alva who threw parties so spectacular (including a costume ball rumored to cost the equivalent of $5 million today) that she brought the wall between old money and new money crumbling down. Fowler knows how to spin a tale, and Alva’s life makes for a riveting one.
