Download PDF My Notorious Life: A Novel, by Kate Manning
Why need to be this publication My Notorious Life: A Novel, By Kate Manning to read? You will never get the understanding and experience without managing yourself there or trying on your own to do it. Thus, reading this e-book My Notorious Life: A Novel, By Kate Manning is required. You could be great and appropriate enough to obtain exactly how essential is reading this My Notorious Life: A Novel, By Kate Manning Also you always check out by responsibility, you could assist yourself to have reading publication routine. It will certainly be so helpful and fun then.
My Notorious Life: A Novel, by Kate Manning
Download PDF My Notorious Life: A Novel, by Kate Manning
Invest your time also for only few minutes to review a publication My Notorious Life: A Novel, By Kate Manning Reviewing a book will never decrease and lose your time to be ineffective. Checking out, for some folks end up being a demand that is to do each day such as hanging out for consuming. Now, just what regarding you? Do you like to review an e-book? Now, we will certainly reveal you a brand-new e-book entitled My Notorious Life: A Novel, By Kate Manning that can be a brand-new means to discover the knowledge. When reading this book, you can obtain something to consistently bear in mind in every reading time, even pointer by action.
Here, we have many book My Notorious Life: A Novel, By Kate Manning as well as collections to check out. We additionally serve variant types as well as type of guides to look. The enjoyable publication, fiction, history, unique, scientific research, as well as various other kinds of publications are offered right here. As this My Notorious Life: A Novel, By Kate Manning, it comes to be one of the favored e-book My Notorious Life: A Novel, By Kate Manning collections that we have. This is why you are in the ideal site to see the impressive books to possess.
It won't take more time to download this My Notorious Life: A Novel, By Kate Manning It won't take even more cash to publish this book My Notorious Life: A Novel, By Kate Manning Nowadays, individuals have actually been so clever to use the technology. Why don't you utilize your gizmo or other device to save this downloaded and install soft documents e-book My Notorious Life: A Novel, By Kate Manning Through this will allow you to consistently be gone along with by this book My Notorious Life: A Novel, By Kate Manning Certainly, it will certainly be the ideal close friend if you read this book My Notorious Life: A Novel, By Kate Manning up until completed.
Be the initial to get this book now and also obtain all reasons you have to review this My Notorious Life: A Novel, By Kate Manning The book My Notorious Life: A Novel, By Kate Manning is not simply for your tasks or need in your life. Publications will certainly consistently be a buddy in every single time you review. Now, allow the others learn about this web page. You could take the perks and discuss it additionally for your close friends and also individuals around you. By by doing this, you can actually obtain the definition of this publication My Notorious Life: A Novel, By Kate Manning beneficially. Just what do you believe concerning our concept below?
“Exquisitely written and richly detailed, My Notorious Life is a marvel. Kate Manning’s rags-to-riches Dickensian saga brings to vivid life the world of nineteenth-century New York City, in all its pitiful squalor and glittering opulence. I loved this novel.” —Christina Baker Kline, New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train
A brilliant rendering of a scandalous historical figure, Kate Manning’s My Notorious Life is an ambitious, thrilling novel introducing Axie Muldoon, a fiery heroine for the ages. Axie’s story begins on the streets of 1860s New York. The impoverished child of Irish immigrants, she grows up to become one of the wealthiest and most controversial women of her day.
In vivid prose, Axie recounts how she is forcibly separated from her mother and siblings, apprenticed to a doctor, and how she and her husband parlay the sale of a few bottles of “Lunar Tablets for Female Complaint” into a thriving midwifery business. Flouting convention and defying the law in the name of women’s reproductive rights, Axie rises from grim tenement rooms to the splendor of a mansion on Fifth Avenue, amassing wealth while learning over and over never to trust a man who says “trust me.”
When her services attract outraged headlines, Axie finds herself on a collision course with a crusading official—Anthony Comstock, founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. It will take all of Axie’s cunning and power to outwit him in the fight to preserve her freedom and everything she holds dear.
Inspired by the true history of an infamous female physician who was once called “the Wickedest Woman in New York,” My Notorious Life is a mystery, a family saga, a love story, and an exquisitely detailed portrait of nineteenth-century America. Axie Muldoon’s inimitable voice brings the past alive, and her story haunts and enlightens the present.
- Sales Rank: #34309 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-09-10
- Released on: 2013-09-10
- Format: Kindle eBook
Amazon.com Review
The Big Fall Books Preview 2013: A historical novel of Dickensian sprawl, My Notorious Life is loosely based on the experiences of an infamous midwife in late 19th century New York. While she’s eventually dubbed Madame X by a rabid press. our heroine’s strength is that for all her success at self transformation, she remains forever the orphaned guttersnipe Axie Muldoon--a pioneer for women’s rights before anyone much knew that such rights could exist. But this novel is never pedantic or preachy, just compelling, assured and irresistible. --Sara Nelson
From Booklist
These fictionalized pages from the diary of the infamous Madame X, a self-proclaimed “expert in the subterranean sanguinary aspects of feminine existence,” tell a compelling and tragic (in its way) success story. Manning (White Girl, 2002) 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. --Donna Chavez
Unknown
“Not just a splendidly page-turning story of an angry orphan clawing her way up in the world, but a gripping docu-drama about women's business (in several senses) in nineteenth-century America. My Notorious Life gives midwifery its full dues: the glories and the miseries, the feminism and the money, the literally bloody ethical dilemmas. Unflinchingly memorable.” (Emma Donoghue, author of Room )
Kate Manning has taken a little known nugget of history and spun it into a remarkable novel that is mesmerizing and resonant. Her New York City of the late nineteenth century is passionately evoked, and Axie Muldoon is as fierce and alive a character as I have read in recent fiction. In its exploration of a subject no less pressing now than it was over a hundred years ago, My Notorious Life is an essential novel for our time.” (Marisa Silver, author of Mary Coin )
“My Notorious Life is wonderful fun. The wit and verve of its unsinkable heroine make this novel a delight to read, even in its most harrowing passages. Beyond that, it’s a book that matters—now more than ever. Faithfully true to the time of its setting, it is also extremely relevant to ours." (Madison Smartt Bell, author of The Color of Night )
“My Notorious Life is a must read for anyone who likes their novels smart, entertaining and provocative. Axie Muldoon's lively, remarkable story begins with an unexpected death and an identity switch and never lets up until the end. Masterful.” (Whitney Otto, author of Eight Girls Taking Pictures )
“A rollicking romp through 19th-century American contraception inspired by the true story of a Manhattan midwife… highlight[s] controversies regarding ‘reproductive health’ that are still raging today. Axie’s profane Irish brogue is vividly recreated… her voice never fails to entertain.” (Kirkus Reviews)
"Manning paints a vivid portrait of this daring yet deeply compassionate woman who is willing to flout convention and defy the law in the name of women’s reproductive rights… it’s the details of Madame X’s private life, told in her thick Irish brogue—about the search for her long-lost siblings, her fiery relationship with her devoted husband, and her growth as a mother—that lend a human face to a this sensational figure." (Publishers Weekly, starred review)
"Manning's novel is based on the life of Ann Lohman, a New York City midwife… its historical setting and language [are] densely and effectively styled." (The New York Times Book Review)
"Paint[s] a landscape of old New York that’s both quaint and terrifying, where love can be bartered over a back-stoop picnic and slander awaits around cobblestoned corners. Come for the notoriety, stay for the sympathy." (The Daily Beast)
"An inspiring, thought-provoking work of historical fiction that is a testament to the strength of the human spirit." (Real Simple)
“Racing along the back alleys and posh avenues of Manhattan… Axie’s fiery story [keeps] burning right to the end." (Ron Charles The Washington Post)
“Based on the life of a controversial 1860s New York City midwife, this involving novel combines romance, family saga and social history to winning effect." (People)
"Manning has created an unforgettable character driven by determination and conscience." (Donna Marchetti Cleveland Plain Dealer)
Most helpful customer reviews
46 of 48 people found the following review helpful.
Midwife loves "My Notorious Life"
By cappuccino lover
As a real life midwife who worked in New York City hospitals for more than two
decades and delivered more than a thousand babies, I loved Kate Manning's "My Notorious Life."
This well-researched beautiful historical novel traces the life of Axie, an impoverished Irish girl from the slums of New York City. Sent out west with her siblings on an "orphan train," she is too rebellious to be adopted either by a childless couple or farm families seeking extra hands. How she becomes a midwife -- and the complexities of that profession, meaning weighing the patients'
needs against the "morality," convention and law of the time -- is the heart of the story.
The issues Axie must face and the way she is hounded by the self-appointed guardians of so-called decency are as timely today as they were more than a century ago. Vivid scenes of childbirth and abortion are accurately described.
Highly recommended to those who enjoy historical fiction or have an interest in women's issues or New York City in the second half of the 19th century.
44 of 49 people found the following review helpful.
A trip back in history
By Amelia68
Every once in a while a book comes along which envelops you in a time capsule and carries you off in space and time for a memorable trip back in history. Kate Manning's My Notorious Life was such a story. After experiencing 19th century New York through the eyes of Manning's plucky and outspoken heroine Axie (Ann) Muldoon I have not only learned a great deal about a chapter in America's history I knew little about, but also appreciate the changes in society which have given women of our time so much more control over our own fates.
Born as the eldest daughter of poor Irish immigrants in New York, Axie Muldoon has had to learn to survive at an early age. With her father dead and her mother seriously injured in a work accident, Axie and her two younger siblings are found wandering the streets in search of food and fall into the hands of Reverend Charles Brace of the Children's Aid Society. Whilst he initially promises salvation from starvation, Axie will later come to see the encounter as a black mark in her personal history when both her sister Dutch and her brother Joe are given up for adoption to farming families in Illinois. Rebelling against a similar fate, Axie finds herself back in New York, living a life of poverty in the household of her mother's new husband's family. After the death of her mother due to childbed fever she is taken in as servant to a local doctor and his wife Mrs Evans, who acts as a local midwife and seller of female remedies.
Over the years of service in the Evans' household, Axie learns some valuable skills from Mrs Evans, which will later set her career as midwife and herbalist - as well as making her one of the most notorious women in New York, the mysterious midwife and accused abortionist Madame X. Facing the fierce opposition of some influential persons of the time and accused of some unspeakable crimes, our plucky heroine must not only fight for the women who rely on her expertise but also for her own freedom.
Based loosely on the true historical New York personality Ann Trow, better known as Madame Restell, Manning explores the common fates of women in the 19th century, when pregnancy and childbirth were often a mixed blessing. With mortality high due to complications in childbirth or postpartum infections, women would flock to anyone who could promise a positive outcome of their pregnancy or a cure for various female ailments. This often included terminating unwanted pregnancies, which was not considered a crime at the time if performed before the baby had "quickened". Interspersed with fascinating facts about medical and midwifery practices at the time as well as some real-life historical figures (such as the pompous Anthony Comstock), My Notorious Life is one of those novels which provides both reading pleasure as well as education.
Although it took me a little while to get used to Axie's unique voice, I found myself quickly drawn in and could not get enough of her - outspoken and courageous, Axie is a wonderful protagonist one cannot but admire. With her own mother lost to childbed fever, Axie's own fear of a similar fate is a great motivator for her to help other women - that this should also provide a source of income and livelihood is due to her clever husband Charlie, who like Axie is a wonderful character I quickly warmed to.
The vast differences in living conditions of New York's different population groups become evident in Axie and Charlie's own rags-to-riches story and highlight the plight of many poor immigrant women of the time. However, even money was no protection against unwanted pregnancies or the dangers of childbirth, which sees even the rich flock to Axie for her expertise. The provocative issue of abortion is explored in a way which highlights the choices and medical care we now take for granted and the dangers of childbirth in an era which historically speaking was not all that long ago. Even readers with strong opinions on the subject should find some of Axie's motivations compelling and thought provoking. Supported by a strong emotional background and three-dimensional characters who appear to be stepping out of the pages of this remarkable novel, it is impossible to close off one's mind to the plight of the various women featuring in the novel - despite any preconceived notions we may harbour. With desperation featuring strongly throughout all aspects of the novel it is impossible not to get under your skin - at times tragic and sad, other times as a triumph of womanhood against all odds. Some scenes were almost like a punch in the solar plexus, so deep was the pain the women had to endure - it may be quite close and personal for some readers.
I highly recommend My Notorious Life to all lovers of historical fiction. By introducing issues many readers may find controversial, this novel would open a multitude of different discussion points for a bookclub read, even if the debate may get quite heated due to the strong emotional background attached to the subject matter. Definitely an author to watch - her first novel Whitegirl also sounds like a very worthwhile read and is now firmly cemented on my tbr list.
132 of 159 people found the following review helpful.
Dickensian: a novel stuffed with vivid characters, lively speech, no padding, not least, a great injustice.
By Jesse Kornbluth
I took a walk in the park and there did meet a friend I think of as the sister I never had. She was walking with a friend, Kate Manning. Writer, meet writer. With a difference: Kate's book was about to be published.
Would I read it?
If only as a favor to the sister I never had, of course.
"My Notorious Life: A Novel" arrived. It was everything I do not want. 434 pages. Set in the 19th century. Told in the first person, in 19th century speech. Based, in part, on the life of Ann Trow Lohman (1811-79) also known as Madame Restell, who practiced midwifery in New York for almost forty years.
In sum: a book not likely to hook me, a reader who likes short books about people I might know or want to. But the friend of a friend is my potential friend --- or, at least, someone I can't shun. I started to read:
"It was me who found her. April 1, 1880. The date is engraved on my story same as it is on the headstone, so cold and solid there under the pines. What happened that morning hurts me to this day, enrages me still, though many years have passed.
"The time was just before dawn. She was there in the tub. It had claw feet, gold faucets. Marble was everywhere in that room, so magnificent. A French carpet. A pair of velvet settees, a dressing table, candelabra, powders and pomades, all deluxe. I knew something was wrong right away. When I knocked I knew. There was not no noise of bathing, just that slow drip. That plink of water landing on water, so dreadful. I went in and there she was. A scarf of red across her shoulders, down her chest. The water was red and cold with all her life leaked out. A bloodbath. My hands were trembling. Terrible sounds strangled in my throat, quiet so as not to wake the house. My little daughter and my husband were fast asleep. The maid was not yet up."
Well done. But... sigh... 19th century prose. Wait: there's a story, and it's quite a tale. Axie Muldoon --- her real name is Annie, but her mother calls her Axie "because I was forever axing so many questions" --- is the child of a poor, one-armed woman, trapped in New York's filthy, airless slums. Her mother dies in childbirth, her brute of a stepfather could care less about her, and Annie and her siblings are shipped off to foster families in the Midwest. Years later, 14-year-old Axie returns to New York, where she's apprenticed to a midwife and taught the art of birthing. But although Mrs. Evans is said to be able to "fix a girl up," Axie doesn't see her do any abortions.
To my surprise, I was on page 110.
Axie has a suitor, Charles Jones. He's as poor as she is, and ambitious, mostly, it seems, to have his way with her. "One evening, when the night was thick with the smell of warmed garbage and the heat was trapped down amongst the buildings" --- there's a romantic setting for you --- he shows up, bearing wine, "a hard swooning taste new to my tongue." He's about to be drafted. He begs. And she succumbs.
A sex scene from 1860? Yes. And I succumbed too.
Women come, all pregnant, all in trouble. At first Axie is disgusted by the work, but she never gets tired "of the drama and the miracle." When Mrs. Evans dies, Axie takes over. Charlie becomes her husband and partner. She is unsure of love, but she trusts money --- it "did not go off elsewhere in the night drinking hops and gin and coming home to fondle a woman and call her names only to pass out." Tart, she is. Cheeky. And a compelling storyteller.
Define "compelling?" Try this: Dickensian. That is, a novel stuffed with vivid characters, lively speech, no dross, a plot that's not ashamed of melodrama, and, not least, a great injustice.
My wife likes to say that the world's biggest drug problem is testosterone, and that is never truer than when the subject is women and their reproductive freedom. In the late 19th century, men imposed codes that made sure this freedom didn't exist, so Axie Muldoon works in the shadows, using euphemism as her first language. Then a villain appears, taken from real life: Anthony Comstock (1844-1915). In the Army, "he refused to drink his ration of whiskey and delighted in pouring it on the ground in front of his comrades in arms." Later, he turned his attention to "vice." Axie finds him a "hideous" man. And knows that "we two, me and Comstock, was barreling toward each other, each one on a mission."
You can, if you like, read "A Notorious Life" as commentary on America's never-ending battle over women's rights. Certainly, Comstock lives on, and not just on Sunday morning political shows and the sidewalks in front of family planning centers. And it will ever be thus, for some American men want to control women's lives even more than they want to put a gun in the hand of every citizen.
I didn't read the book as metaphor --- not because I'm a man, but because "My Notorious Life" really is a Dickensian reading experience. It violates all my little rules for novels. But Axie Muldoon is a heroine and a half, and I cheered her on every page.
My Notorious Life: A Novel, by Kate Manning PDF
My Notorious Life: A Novel, by Kate Manning EPub
My Notorious Life: A Novel, by Kate Manning Doc
My Notorious Life: A Novel, by Kate Manning iBooks
My Notorious Life: A Novel, by Kate Manning rtf
My Notorious Life: A Novel, by Kate Manning Mobipocket
My Notorious Life: A Novel, by Kate Manning Kindle
Няма коментари:
Публикуване на коментар