My Notorious Life – Kate Manning
In the slums of nineteenth-century New York, young Axie Muldoon, the daughter of poor Irish immigrants, loses her father and sees her family torn apart. Sent west on an orphan train with her younger siblings, she is separated from them and returned to the city, where she finds work as a servant in the household of a midwife who provides women with pills and remedies to manage their fertility.
My Notorious Life, by Kate Manning, follows Axie as she grows from a sharp-tongued street child into Madame X, one of the most famous and controversial women in New York. Learning midwifery and the secrets of women’s health, she builds a thriving business delivering babies and supplying women with remedies and, eventually, abortions, at a time when such services were increasingly condemned and criminalized. She marries, becomes wealthy and never stops searching for the brother and sister she lost.
But her success attracts powerful enemies. Moral crusaders, led by a zealous campaigner modeled on the real anti-vice activist Anthony Comstock, denounce her as a murderer and seek to destroy her, and Axie must fight for her freedom and her family.
Inspired by the life of Ann Lohman, the real nineteenth-century midwife known as Madame Restell, the novel is narrated in Axie’s vivid, defiant and often humorous voice. Manning explores poverty, women’s health, motherhood, morality and the hypocrisy of those who condemned women while using their services.
My Notorious Life is a richly detailed and compelling historical novel. It deals with abortion, childbirth, poverty, death and other mature themes that some readers may find sensitive.
Valoraciones
No hay valoraciones aún.