I’ve always loved historic house museums, loved peering beyond the velvet rope into a Victorian bedroom or a colonial kitchen and imagining the ghosts that wore those dresses, or worked the handle of that butter churn, or laid the fire in that grate. If the rooms still exist, with their ornaments and implements intact, surely the people must also be hovering nearby? The veil between past and present feels transparent.
I’ve spent the last five years getting to know Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, pioneering women doctors and prolific writers who gave me plenty to do in the archives. But some of the best discoveries happened when I left the library and started following them around out in the world. When you’re trying to tell a story about people born two centuries ago, it helps to stand where they stood, wherever that is still possible...