So19 Reads: HANNAH WEBSTER FOSTER'S The Coquette

What a gift to have this meticulous edition of a fascinating but (to most of us, at least) long forgotten book. 

Hannah Webster Foster (1758 or 1759 - 1840) published The Coquette anonymously in 1797. Her epistolary novel became a bestseller, though it wasn’t attributed to Foster until almost twenty years after her death. Foster based her story on the real-life case of Elizabeth Whitman, an accomplished and attractive woman who was twice engaged but never married. After she became pregnant by a lover (his identity is still unknown), she traveled to a roadside tavern under the name “Mrs. Walker” and died after giving birth to a stillborn child. While her personal story was generally viewed as a tale of well- (or ill-?) deserved moral consequences rather than a relatable human tragedy, Foster’s revision of events takes a more nuanced view. 

In this meticulously produced edition, the full text of the novel is accompanied by its 1855 Preface and an 1875 response, which provide invaluable context. The book showcases a complex narrative, its literary afterlife, and the way stories are told and retold, interpreted and reinterpreted. 

Hannah Foster Webster was also the author of a 1798 novel called The Boarding School; or, Lessons of a Preceptress to Her Pupils, which explores education for women and its application in their adult lives. Like The Coquette, its author was credited simply as "A Lady of Massachusetts." The author's daughters, Harriet Vaughan Cheney and Eliza Lanesford Cushing, both became popular 19th-century authors.

The publisher of this edition of The Coquette, P-Wave Press, also publishes excellent editions of historic texts by Charlotte Lenox, Thomas Holcroft, and Thomas Love Peacock among others.

The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster is internationally on the P-Wave Press website and also, in America, on Amazon. P-Wave Press Classics, April 2026.

So19 Reads: ADITI BHIDE'S Secrets of the Monsoon Sky

In Bhide's vividly evoked debut novel, a young woman seeks family connection amid the cultural collisions and constraints of World War I-era India. 

Eartha Rae is raised in a British orphanage, becomes a hospital nurse during the first World War, and accepts a private nursing job in Winchcombe, England after the mental distress (we'd call it PTSD) of military nursing grows too great. When she receives a letter from a woman claiming to be her aunt, she's both wary and intrigued. It's possible that the letter is a scam—but if the writer is actually her aunt, she might be able to provide the family information and connection Eartha has has always longed for. 

Their meeting leaves Eartha convinced that Mary S. Martin is just who she claims, and, though she doesn't yet learn how she ended up in a British orphanage, she relishes even the snippets of information her aunt shares in their initial conversation. After her employer dies, Eartha accepts Martin's invitation to join her in Chandangudi, India, where her husband Angus works as a civilian administrator in the Indian Army. By the time she arrives in Bombay weeks later, Mrs. Martin is dead of fever, leaving no one but Eartha's devastated uncle and the community's Englishwomen to help her adjust to the life of the British in India.

So19 Reads: AMY AZZARITO'S Secret Language of Victorian Jewelry

Organized alphabetically from "Acorn" to "Wreath," Azzarito's beautiful book explores the symbolism and lore that gave deeper meaning to the gems and jewelry of the Victorian period. Largely forgotten today, this symbolism would have been readable —and significant—to those who made, sold, bought and wore jewelry at the time. "In this world of repressed emotion, symbolic meaning was everywhere. There was floriography, which uncovered the secret meanings behind flowers; there was a secret language of stamps, where the placement of postage could convey a coded meaning; colors had symbolic meanings; and then there was jewelry," the author writes. "Consider this volume your code breaker," she concludes. Copious illustrations of jewelry from the era are paired with period images depicting pieces or the tales that infused them, brief histories of the symbolism involved, and snippets of age-old lore; high quality reproductions and lively design make the pages a visual treat. Secret Language of Victorian Jewelry offers a rich, fun and useful overview of not just what the Victorians wore, but also the way they thought.

If you, like me, are a person fascinated by the meaning of objects, I also recommend Azzarito's excellent The Elements of a Home: Curious Histories Behind Everyday Objects, from Pillows to Forks.

Buy Secret Language of Victorian Jewelry by Amy Azzarito on Bookshop or Amazon. Clarkson Potter, August 2026.

So19 Reads: MARGARET WALLER'S Napoleon's Closet

Margaret Waller takes a deeply researched but unconventional look at fashion conventions in this engaging study of the way dress reflects and constructs identity, class and masculinity. Her book illuminates, and interrogates, the period (roughly 1760 to 1830 in France) fashion historians call "the great male renunciation," a time during which men's fashion garb moved from the flamboyant peacockery of earlier eras into the darker, simpler and less varied types of garments that remain the norm for men today. To explore the issues involved, she focuses on two men: Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), who became the Emperor of France, and Pierre Antoine Le Boux La Mésangère (1761-1831), a defrocked priest who became a celebrated fashion arbiter—an emperor, so to speak, of fashion. Different as the men seem superficially, Waller perceives crucial similarities, noting that "both were provincial outsiders from the lower nobility who had to learn to look and behave like insiders," and "each wielded the power to tell others what to wear while breaking their own rules."

Waller had me at the first line of the Preface: "'What if I told you I don’t have a belly button?' Father McCrory asked. Some of my classmates shifted in their seats. Silence." While the book's main text is typically less surprising than that example, one of its great strengths lies in Waller's ability to marry scholarly research with ideas and queries that are anything but dull, dusty and drably "academic." The result is a book that has much to share about cultural history and also much to say about the construction of—and conflicts around—ideas of masculinity today.

Buy Napoleon's Closet: The Emperor, the Priest, and the Men Who Invented Modern Fashion by Margaret Waller at Bookshop or Amazon. Columbia University Press, 2026.

So19 Reads: DAVID CONRAD-PÉREZ's The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and the Origins of Modern Charity

"There have been few moments in American history that can be so specifically pinpointed as forever changing the character of the nation," the author writes in the Prologue to this marvelous study of the devastating 1911 factory fire and its consequences for American commercial and civic life. It's a huge claim, but Conrad-Pérez's book thoroughly supports it. Conrad-Pérez acknowledges that, as demonstrated in a number of existing works on the topic, the fire led to new labor laws and protections, "a calamity that became a catalyst, laws rising from smoke." "What is less known," he comments, "is that the fire also provided the definitive spark in the rise...of modern charity in the United States, a watershed moment that instantly recast a group of wealthy bankers and social elites as experts on social problems. And that long buried legacy—popularizing charity as a professionalized industry—has shaped the prevailing path through which the country meets issues of social crisis and poverty ever since, leading it away from the true drivers of its most persistent challenges. It's a more complicated story but, in our moment, as consequential." Conrad-Pérez mines previously unknown, unused or overlooked records, from private diaries to interviews with the descendants of those involved, to inform his work. The result is an intricate, detailed, and deeply researched book that is also a vivid and riveting story. It's a heartbreaking narrative, but a profoundly rewarding one. 

Buy Fire in the Heart of the City: The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and the Origins of Modern Charity by David Conrad-Pérez on Bookshop or Amazon. NYU Press, September 2026.

So19 Reads: NANCY BILYEAU'S The Heiress of Northanger Abbey

Old threats, like vampires, never die in Bilyeau's excellent extension of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. The Catherine Morland of that novel, now 39, lives happily with her husband, Henry Tilney, and children at Woodston Rectory, some twenty miles distant from the Tilney family seat at Northanger Abbey. The years have led to some softening of her frame—"My looking glass showed a face rounder than when I first saw Northanger. If I tilted my chin down, a bit of flesh wiggled below"—but given her considerably more confidence. She still remembers the wild fantasies her youthful immersion in Gothic novels inspired. “I admit my imagination ran to more extremes than painted glass," she tells the children of her friend and sister-in-law, now Viscountess Granville. "I was certain that any place called an ‘abbey’ must be full of thick cobwebs, crumbling furniture, and dark and dirty secret passageways.” But she's also able to laugh at herself, commenting that the Granville daughters reacted to those visions "with as much astonishment as if I’d said I expected a herd of crazed beasts to rampage through the garden roses."

The novel opens with a letter from Catherine's 17-year-old daughter Phoebe, who is staying in Bath with her childless uncle Frederick Tilney and his wife. (Appropriately, the missive arrives amid a storm, which delivers a flash of lightning that "illuminated General Tilney’s portrait. In that second, his cold, calculating eyes turned fiery, as if he were angry with me. I could feel the rage pouring off the portrait as it did twenty‑two years ago from the man himself.") Phoebe mentions meeting Isabella and John Thorpe, whose greed endangered her decades before and who now hope to interest the 17 year old, who they believe to be Frederick Tilney's heir, in John's son Jack. Catherine's maternal instinct, and perhaps some of what we might call PTSD from her own encounter with the Thorpes, sound an ear-splitting alarm. She persuades Henry that she must visit Bath to warn and protect Phoebe, and the plot is off and running.

Crafting a satisfying sequel to a classic novel is a tough job, and many such books feel like faint, faded echoes of their originals. Bilyeau's homage, in contrast, meets the challenge admirably. Catherine is recognizably the girl from Austen's novel but also a convincing middle-aged mother; the settings, from a recently redecorated Abbey to the watering-place of Bath, are vividly rendered; the outsize power of inheritance to shape Regency lives remains a central theme; as importantly as any of those, the novel's voice is suitably wry and lively. Bilyeau succeeds, too, in playing Gothic tropes and tales against the novel's earthly (one might say grubby) dangers. John Polidori's The Vampyre, publishing the year before this novel opens, is used to excellent effect, as are the briefer references to sensation fiction sprinkled throughout the text. Like Austen's, Bilyeau's novel is a love letter to literature and the imagination, as well as a meditation on the importance of reading—and trusting—real-world clues. 

Buy The Heiress of Northanger Abbey by Nancy Bilyeau on Bookshop or Amazon. Admiral Road Books, 2026.

So19 Reads: ALYSSA MAXWELL'S Murder at Rosecliff

Maxwell makes another charming visit to Gilded Age Newport in this story of flaunted wealth and surreptitious wrongdoing. As always, the story involves one of the Newport "cottages," this time the Rosecliff mansion designed by Stanford White for silver heiress Theresa Fair Oelrichs. Deftly interweaving fictional and historic figures and grounding the murderous mayhem in real-world matters such as the era's ruthless business practices, Maxwell delivers a fun and perfectly paced read. In addition to the well-paced plotting, I enjoyed the many rich details Maxwell incorporates. Just for example, when narrator/protagonist Emma Cross Andrews attends the Rosecliff "White Ball," she eschews such well-known society couturiers as Worth and Paquin in favor of a dress by Anna Muthesius, a proponent of women's dress reform. It's a tiny detail, but a telling one: though she is a part of the Newport scene, she has never followed its dictates slavishly. Purchase Murder at Rosecliff by Alyssa Maxwell at Bookshop or Amazon. Kensington, August 2025.