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The international bestselling author of INTO THE WILDERNESS makes her highly anticipated return with a remarkable epic about two female doctors in nineteenth-century New York and the transcendent power of courage and love… The Gilded Hour is the story of Anna and Sophie Savard, distant cousins, both orphaned as young girls, who are taken into their Aunt Quinlan‘s Manhattan home to be raised. It is an unusual household where rational thought and artistic sensibilities are equally valued, corsets are rejected as restrictive and demeaning, and little girls are encouraged to play, explore, and ask questions. And it is an exciting time to be growing up in the city, given advances in technology, science and medicine, the growth of the railroads and the introduction of electricity. Post-Civil War Manhattan is bursting at the seams with refugees, veterans, new immigrants and the nouveau riche . Mansions go up along Fifth Avenue while Irish, German and Italian immigrants scrape out a living in what the health department called the Insalubrious Districts. The Vanderbilts spend millions of dollars to throw a costume ball while tens of thousands of children wander the streets and sleep on doorsteps and fire escapes. As daughters and granddaughters of talented physicians and healers, Anna and Sophie both take up the formal study of medicine at the medical school founded by the Blackwell sisters. Because Sophie is also a woman of color she must deal with those who will not even credit her with the credentials she has earned, as happens on the day the story opens when she pays a house call to a woman in labor. It is on this same day that Anna is asked to examine newly orphaned children of immigrant Italian factory workers who raise memories she has tried so hard to set away from herself. These two events will bring the Savard cousins into conflict with Anthony Comstock, the self-proclaimed Weeder in the Garden of the Lord, a man who took delight in sending those he found morally repugnant to prison. As he did so often with physicians who treated impoverished women and children. "This is an outstanding first novel in a new series, and with it comes all the best feelings evoked by good writing: empathy, concern, drive, despair, and ecstasy. It’s the beginning of the best of journeys in historical fiction." -- Historical Novel Society.
Genre: Historical
Genre: Historical
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