History, Mystery, and More!
I investigate historical mysteries for a living. Below are some of the articles I've written for magazines and online publications about my adventures. There's lots to discover--so explore and enjoy!
The Secret Codes of Lady Wroth, the First Female English Novelist
In 2019, I discovered a 400-year-old book with a cryptic cipher on the cover. It belonged to the first female English novelist, Lady Mary Wroth. Read my article here for Smithsonian Magazine about the story of love and loss the cipher conceals--and how I uncovered it.
"The First Folio in the Web of Readers and Collectors." Edited by Claire Bourne and Holger Syme. Shakespeare Quarterly 74.4 (2023): 405-414.
A Forgotten Trailblazer
Edna St. Vincent Millay was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, but she is little remembered today. Rediscover her poetry--and how it speaks to our experience of the COVID-19 pandemic--here.
Beyond Green Gables
You know Lucy Maud Montgomery best as the author of the beloved children's classic Anne of Green Gables--but what else did she write? Discover seven more of Montgomery's lesser-known works here in my listicle for Mental Floss.
(Quarantined in)
A Room of One's Own
“One knows nothing detailed, nothing perfectly true and substantial about her. History scarcely mentions her,” modernist Virginia Woolf said of women writers in 1929. Until now.
Read my article for the LA Review of Books blog about setting the historical record straight and curating the exhibit "500 Years of Women Authors, Authorizing Themselves"--at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
