WELCOME!
Welcome to the first issue of our newsletter. I say our newsletter, not because I’m pregnant or believe I’m the queen of anything. “Speaking of Historical Fiction” is ours because you’re invited to join the conversation by sending your histfic essays, historical trivia, questions, and recommendations and reviews (300 words maximum) of historical novels to lamarys@yahoo.com. Please remember that all submissions should be appropriate for young adults as well as older readers. Thanks to M. Dudas, our first guest reviewer, for her review of Ida, in Love and in Trouble by Veronica Chambers. Each Substack newsletter will also be archived on the blog section of the Web site https://marylashbooks.com
Let’s share our knowledge and love of history and historical fiction. In this season of gratitude and renewal, I thank you and wish you and all our human family justice and peace. -- Mary
BOOK REVIEW
Ida, in Love and in Trouble
by Veronica Chambers (Little, Brown and Company, 2024)
Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) transformed her fiery words into a sword and slashed at the twin evils of racism and lynching. In this historical novel based on Wells’s life, Veronica Chambers reveals that there was more to the crusading journalist than her activism.
The first half of Ida, in Love and in Trouble gives a glimpse into the private life of Wells. As a young woman she was pretty and petite and had a temper she tried to keep in check. She worried about her reputation (social mores were more inflexible in the 19th century). She worried about her financial obligations while longing for the beautiful fashions of her wealthier friends. She corresponded with a bevy of beaux.
Chambers depicts how racism struck home when one of Wells’s friends, along with two other men, was brutally murdered after an altercation involving one white boy and one black boy. The fight between two children spread to a major incident. A mob destroyed a store owned by black men and later killed them, dumping their bodies in a railroad yard. Wells’s written words following the murders ignited further white rage. A mob attacked the newspaper office where she worked, destroying the printing presses. She had been living in Memphis, but death threats drove her out, never to return.
Wells then traveled to England and met with antislavery activists. In the United States, she became fast friends with Frederick Douglass. She campaigned relentlessly for the causes of equality and justice. In 1895, she married Ferdinand L. Barnett, a Chicago lawyer and editor. The couple had four children.
Veronica Chambers’s engaging new novel provides insight into the challenges faced by Wells and other Black Americans during the time of racist Jim Crow policies and the courage it took to confront them. -- M. Dudas, Guest Reviewer
You can buy Ida, in Love and in Trouble at https://bookshop.org/p/books/ida-in-love-and-in-trouble-veronica-chambers/8e6e8534041e4268?ean=9780316500166&next=t
TRIVIA IN TIME
Pink Is for Girls, Of Course
If the cute baby in that stroller is wearing a pink onesie, we’re likely to assume that of course it’s a girl. But if we lived in the 18th century, we would assume the opposite.
It’s true: until the 1920s, pink was a color used for dressing little boys, while little girls commonly wore blue. In the United States, the gender assumptions associated with those two pastel colors have now reversed themselves, although many of us now believe that it’s not important to dress either children or our adult selves in one color or another. Isn’t it interesting how our cultural associations with certain colors can change!
Source: For more, see “The Complicated Gender History of Pink” by Puja Bhattacharjee (2018).
https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/12/health/colorscope-pink-boy-girl-gender
Have a Book Club?
If you’re a member of a book club that would like to discuss Women of Glass and Steel, get in touch. I might be able to join your group by Zoom for a discussion, or in person if we live in the same area (upstate South Carolina). lamarys@yahoo.com