Susan Higginbotham
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I'm Susan. I write historical fiction and nonfiction set in medieval and Tudor England and, most recently, nineteenth-century America. As a writer of biographical fiction, one of my main goals is to avoid the stereotypes, myths, and misconceptions that have gathered around historical figures over the centuries.
Susan Higginbotham
7M ago
In May 1855, American newspapers were abuzz with talk of a wedding. The bride and groom were not society folk or European royalty: they were Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, abolitionists and women’s rights activists. Although in many ways their wedding ceremony was typical of the time—the bride wore a lovely dress, a clergyman performed the ceremony, and a wedding breakfast followed—it was no ordinary wedding, for it began with a protest.
Lucy Stone was born in a farmhouse on Coy’s Hill near West Brookfield, Massachusetts, on August 13, 1818. As she matured, she became interested in two c ..read more
Susan Higginbotham
9M ago
Library of Congress
For Women’s History Month, here’s a short piece I posted on Facebook about dress reformer, army surgeon, author, and eccentric Dr. Mary Edwards Walker (1832-1919). (She doesn’t appear in The Queen of the Platform, as I have no evidence that she and Ernestine Rose ever met, but it would have been fun to overhear a conversation between these two women if their paths ever did cross.)
Born into a freethinking, abolitionist family that supported her ambitions, Mary graduated from Syracuse Medical College in 1855. Having married a fellow medical student, and entered into practice ..read more
Susan Higginbotham
10M ago
At long last, I’m pleased to say that The Queen of the Platform will be available on March 12, just in time for Women’s History Month! It can be found in paperback and e-book form at your favorite online bookstore or ordered in paperback through your local bookseller. Can’t wait to get my latest book before readers’ eyes at last!
Speaking of Women’s History Month, my fellow author Janis Robinson Daly created this list of biographical historical novels featuring women. It’s a great mix of authors, publishers, subjects, and eras, and it includes my latest, so check it out!
If you’re on Faceboo ..read more
Susan Higginbotham
1y ago
I recently visited England (my first visit in way too many years), partly to track down some residences associated with Ernestine Rose, the heroine of my forthcoming novel, The Queen of the Platform. Although Ernestine spent many years in New York City, none of her homes there have survived modern development, so it was a treat to be able to look at her English residences.
Our first stop is in Bath, where Ernestine and her husband, William Ella Rose, lodged in 1870 and 1871. The Roses lived at 24 Paragon, one of many crescent-shaped streets in that city. As with all of their homes, the couple ..read more
Susan Higginbotham
1y ago
In 1870, the widowed Mary Lincoln and her son Tad, who had already been in one war zone in Washington, D.C., found themselves in another as France and Prussia faced off.
Mary Lincoln in mourning after the death of her son Willie (my collection)
After her husband’s assassination, Mary refused to return to Springfield, Illinois.[1] Although the Lincolns owned a home at Eighth and Jackson Streets there, and three of her married sisters lived nearby, Mary was on chilly terms with many of her former neighbors. She decided instead to make her home in Chicago. Accompanied by her sons Robert and Tad ..read more
Susan Higginbotham
1y ago
In 1851, a new word entered the fashion lexicon: the “Bloomer.” It referred not to undergarments but to what had been known previously by such names as the “reform dress” and the “Turkish dress”: essentially, a short dress paired with pantaloons, in place of the constricting women’s garments of the day. It would become associated with women’s rights activists, especially with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and the woman who accidentally bestowed her name upon the garment, Amelia Bloomer.
Unidentified woman from my collection
Although the dress reform movement first attra ..read more
Susan Higginbotham
1y ago
In researching my forthcoming novel on Ernestine Rose, I quickly found that biographers knew little about her family–only the names of her husband William Ella Rose and the three nieces that she named in her last will and testament. Knowing that genealogical information is far more accessible now than it was to her biographers, I set off to discover what I could. To my delight, I managed to identify Ernestine’s parents, four of her siblings, and one of her two children–and stumbled across a secret as well. (Hint: William Ella Rose, Ernestine’s beloved husband, was her second husband.) After al ..read more
Susan Higginbotham
1y ago
National Portrait Gallery: Stanton and Anthony photographed by Napoleon Sarony ca. 1870
In July 1863, the infamous “draft riots” roiled New York. Among those caught up in the violence were the two people most associated with the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s husband, Henry Stanton, had been appointed Deputy Collector of the New York Custom House in 1861. Elizabeth Cady Stanton seized this opportunity to move from Seneca Falls to the metropolis with her family. In 1863, the family was living at 75 West 45th Stre ..read more
Susan Higginbotham
1y ago
In nineteenth-century London (and apparently into the 1960s), it was possible for the venturesome to climb all the way to the interior of the golden ball surmounting St. Paul’s Cathedral in London (right below the cross). One of those who made the effort was the intrepid feminist Ernestine Rose, who along with her husband was traveling abroad in the summer of 1856. Ernestine wrote in a letter to the Boston Investigator on July 6, 1856, “In St. Paul’s, after seeing the library, we went up to the Whispering Gallery, the clock, and the ball under the cross. It is 510 feet from the crypt; twelve ..read more
Susan Higginbotham
1y ago
A while back, I was fortunate enough to acquire this letter written by John Brown, Jr., the oldest son of the abolitionist John Brown, just a few months after his father’s ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry and his subsequent execution. John writes from his Ohio home to his family in North Elba, New York: his married sister, Ruth Brown Thompson; his stepmother, Mary; his half-sisters, Annie, Sarah, and Ellen; his half-brother Salmon Brown; and his widowed sister-in-law Isabel “Bell” Brown. Presumably he anticipated that the letter would be handed around freely; hence the “cousins.”
John Jr. had n ..read more