Fast-forward to 2007, when my husband and I moved to Hastings, England, for 15 months. The town's many used bookshops were full of wonderful Victorian magazines. At first, I was re-captivated by the artwork (shades of those old Letraset sheets). But in the delightful Boulevard Bookshop and Thai Cafe, I came across The Girl's Own Paper, and entered a whole new world. This magazine brought the Victorian world to life with its articles on fashion, cooking, etiquette, social customs, holidays, women's issues, history, and more. It also challenged my notions of what a Victorian women's magazine was like. And so my collection began.

As that collection grew, I wanted to share it. Most of the magazines I found had never been digitized (and most still haven't). So I set up VictorianVoices.net as a means of making this material available to the world. Most of the articles posted here are still not available electronically anywhere else.

In 2014, I launched the e-magazine Victorian Times, bringing together the "best of the best" of the article collection. I had to pause the series in 2019 for other projects, but relaunched "Series 2" in 2024. Some wonderful subscriber (thank you, whoever you are!) called the site to the attention of an editor at Pen and Sword Books, in Yorkshire. She liked what she saw, and to make a long story short, asked me to write the Victorian volume in their ongoing "How to Survive" series. How to Survive in Victorian Britain will be coming out some time in the spring of 2026!

Once the book was written, I realized there was still a lot more to say about Victorian life - myths to bust, misperceptions to counter, and so many connections to be made between the Victorian world and our own. And so the blog was born.

Details, Details...

I started college planning to get a history degree - but soon realized that what fascinated me was not events and dates and famous people, but how ordinary people lived. So I switched my major to anthropology - and I suppose that's still what I'm doing with this site. I've been writing professionally since 1980, with loads of articles and several commercially published books,* along with quite a few self-published works. My husband and I have wandered around the country quite a bit, generally due to job relocations; we've also lived in Germany and England. We're currently living in the St. Louis area, sharing our home with the obligatory writer's cat (though she'd say it was the reverse).

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