Set in gritty New York City in the last half of the nineteenth century, My Notorious Life is a vibrant portrait of Axie Muldoon, a plucky orphan who becomes one of the most successful, and controversial, midwives of her time. Told in a magnetic voice, pulsing and vivid, Axie recounts how she is separated from her mother and siblings and apprenticed to a doctor and midwife and how she later parlays the sale of a few bottles of "lunar tonic for female complaints" into a thriving midwifery practice with her husband and fellow orphan friend, Charles G. Jones. But Axie is on a collision course with one of the most zealous, censorious characters of her era: Anthony Comstock, founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and it will take all of Axie's power to outwit him and save both herself and her family from ruin.
A love story, a family saga, and a brilliant rendering of a historical time, this is also a moving and nuanced commentary on an important topic: women's control of their bodies. But ultimately, it is the story of one woman making her indomitable way in a difficult world. With her fierce and vibrant spirit, Axie Muldoon is an indelible heroine for the ages.
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“Manning convincingly
presents willful nineteenth-century child Axie Muldoon, based on an actual
person, who was born of piss-poor Irish immigrants but was as prideful as the
queen herself. And it’s a good thing too, or else Axie—later to become Mrs.
Anne Jones then Madame DeBeausacq then Madame X—might have died of starvation
or hypothermia on the streets of an indifferent New York City. Or worse, she
might have died in childbirth like her mother. But witnessing her mother’s
unnecessary death inflamed a coal in Axie’s heart that burned for every woman
she encountered who faced uniquely feminine perils. Manning’s fascinating
dramatization of the hazards of her protagonist’s pillar-to-post childhood and
slave-labor apprenticeship, followed by her creation of Madame X’s
above-and-around-the-law career vividly and movingly portray an unsympathetic
world for women.”
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Booklist