| ||||||||||
 
Dr. Ronald P. Rogers CHIROPRACTOR Support for your body's natural healing capabilities 270-384-5554 Click here for details 
  
Columbia Gas Dept. GAS LEAK or GAS SMELL Contact Numbers 24 hrs/ 365 days 270-384-2006 or 9-1-1 Call before you dig 
Visit ColumbiaMagazine's Directory of Churches Addresses, times, phone numbers and more for churches in Adair County Find Great Stuff in ColumbiaMagazine's Classified Ads Antiques, Help Wanted, Autos, Real Estate, Legal Notices, More... 
|
Tom Chaney: Rights of Women Of Writers and their Books, Assassination, Abolition, and the Rights of Women deals with women sleuths created by Miriam Grace Monfredo. It first appeared 7 October 2007 The next earlier Tom Chaney column: Tom Chaney: Dysfunctional Heroes By Tom Chaney Assassination, Abolition, and the Rights of Women Serendipity has once again reared its delightful head. This time in the guise of another woman mystery writer dealing with women sleuths. The author is Miriam Grace Monfredo, herself a librarian. The women sleuths are variously Glynis Tryon librarian of Seneca Falls, New York, and Glynis' niece Bronwen Llyr who has bullied her way into employment by the Pinkerton Detective Agency about the time of President Lincoln's inauguration. The novel which first caught my eye was The Stalking Horse, fifth in Monfredo's Seneca Falls Series. Pinkerton sends Bronwen to Montgomery, Alabama, before the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as president of the rebel government. She is supposed to be in the tutelage of two veteran agents. Both of those agents are killed leaving Bronwen on her own. The murder of the two agents is related to a confederate plot to assassinate president-elect Abraham Lincoln in Baltimore on his way to take office in Washington. Much of the novel is given to her hair-raising trip by rail and ship to get word back to northern authorities. Neither the reader nor Bronwen know just whom to trust. In the end, all is well as Monfredo weaves mid-nineteenth century political and social history with her believable cast of fictional creations to create a mystery which both informs and entertains. In fact, I was so delighted by The Stalking Horse that I hied me to the mystery department to see what other Monfredo might be lurking there. I was amply rewarded by The North Star Conspiracy set in the mid 1850's, some seven years before The Stalking Horse. In this novel, Glynis Tryon herself is the detective. The town of Seneca Falls is opening a new theatre in an abandoned church. The church had become the property of the local bank after its minister was forced to leave the territory after providing too much pastoral comfort to certain ladies of the village. Glynis investigates the suspicious death of a freed slave and unearths the grizzly details of a ten-year-old murder of an escaping Virginia slave. Seneca Falls is a station on the underground railroad helping fleeing slaves get to the nearby Canadian border. The fictional Glynis is aided by a number of historical figures -- among them Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Frederick Douglass. The North Star Conspiracy comes to an intricate climax with a courtroom scene in Virginia resulting in the acquittal of a young native of Seneca Falls who has spirited a beautiful young slave to the north and freedom. The first novel in the Seneca Falls series, The Seneca Falls Inheritance, is set in 1848 at the time of the Women's Rights Convention in the actual Seneca Falls, New York. Glynis realizes in the course of the series that the rights of women are closely related to the rights of slaves and that both must be the subject of acts of civil disobedience. Glynis is an independent woman who rejects marriage and family in favor of a career in a time when women were regarded as decorative ornaments to society useful for bearing and raising children but having no thoughts or opinions of their own. Author Monfredo does good service in providing a look into the neglected history of the women's movement. "How can women know what they are entitled to today if they don't know what they've done in the past?" she asks. Tom Chaney can be found telling stories, planning his next meal, and occasionally selling books at THE BOOKSTORE Box 73 / 111 Water Street Horse Cave, Kentucky 42749 270-786-3084 Email: Tom Chaney http://www.alibris.com/stores/horscave This story was posted on 2012-10-07 04:50:59
Printable: this page is now automatically formatted for printing.
Have comments or corrections for this story? Use our contact form and let us know. More articles from topic Tom Chaney: Of Writers and Their Books:
Tom Chaney: Dysfunctional Heroes - Patricia Cornwell Tom Chaney: Grafton - Father and Daughter Tom Chaney: R780: The shock of reminder Tom Chaney: Shadows on the Wall Tom Chaney: Just Like a Goose Tom Chaney No. R776 - Roast Pig and Charles Lamb Tom Chaney: R775 - a novelist and an historian look at Lincoln Tom Chaney: No. R774: Revenge and Apple Fritters Tom Chaney - R773: The Blue Hen's Chicks Tom Chaney - R771: Ireland and the Storyteller View even more articles in topic Tom Chaney: Of Writers and Their Books |
 
115 Jamestown St. Columbia, KY. 270-384-2496 
  
   
 Provided by the Adair Co Fiscal Court and the Adair Co. Emergency Mgt. Agency 
|
||||||||
|
| ||||||||||
|
Quick Links to Popular Features
Looking for a story or picture? Try our Photo Archive or our Stories Archive for all the information that's appeared on ColumbiaMagazine.com. | ||||||||||
|
Contact us: Columbia Magazine and columbiamagazine.com are published by Linda Waggener and Pen Waggener, PO Box 906, Columbia, KY 42728. Please use our contact page, or send questions about technical issues with this site to webmaster@columbiamagazine.com. All logos and trademarks used on this site are property of their respective owners. All comments remain the property and responsibility of their posters, all articles and photos remain the property of their creators, and all the rest is copyright 1995-Present by Columbia Magazine. Privacy policy: use of this site requires no sharing of information. Voluntarily shared information may be published and made available to the public on this site and/or stored electronically. Anonymous submissions will be subject to additional verification. Cookies are not required to use our site. However, if you have cookies enabled in your web browser, some of our advertisers may use cookies for interest-based advertising across multiple domains. For more information about third-party advertising, visit the NAI web privacy site.
| ||||||||||
