This advertisement in the New York Times during the 1918 influenza pandemic caught my attention, and I wondered if the advice on Spanish flu cures would apply to our 2020 coronavirus pandemic. “Avoid crowds, coughs and cowards, but fear neither germs nor Germans!” Given that World War I was raging across the world, it makes sense that people feared the…
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Jo March in Little Women has long been an inspiration for my novel’s main character Helen. When considering which books and heroines Helen would have read in the early 1900s, Louisa May Alcott and her story about family or independence, love or career, and domesticity or adventure would have given Helen much to ponder. Other books that guided the development…
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Life was pretty fun last week during the Historical Novel Society conference. Hundreds of historical fiction authors came together for three days of inspiration, presentations, and discussions. One of my favorite events was a coffee klatch discussing the New Woman hosted by historical fiction authors Hazel Gaynor and Stephanie Lehmann. “The New Woman,” as the media branded her in the…
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The Spanish flu death toll is estimated at 50,000,000 people. That number continues to stun me and was one of the reasons I was inspired to write a historical fiction novel about the 1918 influenza pandemic. I think it’s hard for us—in our modern world of vaccines and antivirals and antibiotics—to fathom 50 million deaths from flu or even 50…
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Writing historical fiction about the 1918 flu pandemic, which took place during the last year of world war one, has taken years of research. Since 2010, to be exact. My historical novel required learning about medicine in ww1, war nursing, the history of viruses, as well as all I could discover about the great influenza. In talking with other authors…
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