I loved having the opportunity to learn more about Victorian Era medicine and surgery while researching this book, mostly by reading medical journals, catalogues of surgical instruments, and textbooks on surgery, all from the 1870s (thanks, Google Books). Although some of the practices and procedures were just as primitive as I’d imagined, Victorian medicine turned out to be far more advanced than I’d expected. Starting around 1865, Sir Joseph Lister transformed surgery with sterile antiseptic surgery practices and became the father of modern medicine. Advances in anesthesia made it possible for surgeons to perform delicate and complex procedures, such as the one described in this book, which they’d never been able to attempt before. Physicians were able to use microscopes with powerful new lenses and draw from their accumulating knowledge of chemistry to accurately diagnose and treat conditions such as Helen’s anemia.
The character of Pandora is my homage to the real-life board game designer Elizabeth Magie, who invented several games, including one called The Landlord Game in 1906. Charles Darrow eventually sold his version of the game to Parker Brothers and titled it Monopoly. For decades, Charles Darrow was given sole credit for creating Monopoly, but it wouldn’t exist without Elizabeth Magie’s role as the original inventor.
Gabriel’s reference to “the thousand natural shocks” is from the “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I think it’s a perfect phrase to describe the normal challenges and conflicts we all face in life.
I’ve tried to make all the information regarding British women’s property law in 1877 as accurate as possible. The notion of a married woman owning property or having a separate legal identity from her husband was resisted by society and the government for a painfully long time. A series of Married Women’s Property Acts passed in 1870, 1882, and 1884 gradually allowed women to keep their own money and property instead of having it automatically go to their husbands.
Also it is true, as Pandora states, that Queen Victoria was against women’s suffrage. As Victoria wrote in 1870, “I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women’s Rights’, with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feelings and propriety. Feminists ought to get a good whipping. Were woman to ‘unsex’ themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful heathen and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection.”
More than ever, after having read so much about the incredible frustration and suffering of our sisters in the not-to-distant past, I cherish the rights they fought for—and won. Never discount your worth, my dear friends. Our opinions and our voices are valuable! The sparks you have inside will provide light for future generations, just as those wonderful women did for us.