19th Century Historical Women’s Fiction

The Arsenic Eater's Wife by Tonya Mitchell

A woman is accused of killing her husband, but is she guilty? Inspired by a true historical case, this spellbinding novel will delight and engross readers.

Liverpool, 1889. In the shadowy streets, the air is thick with secrets and the line between guilt and innocence blurs. Twenty-six-year-old Constance Sullivan is brought to trial charged with poisoning her husband William. But William is no ordinary victim…

As Constance’s barrister fights to prove her innocence, a sinister web of deception unravels, exposing the dark underbelly of their seemingly idyllic marriage.

One by one, witnesses emerge with incriminating testimony and facts about the dark side of Constance and William’s marriage are revealed. For many, the widow’s guilt seems clear. But is someone holding the key to the whole truth?

Inspired by a true case, The Arsenic Eater’s Wife will hold the reader spellbound until the last heart-stopping revelation.

“Gloriously Gothic, alarmingly good.” — The Poisoner’s Cabinet Podcast

“A provocative, suspenseful Gothic treat of a novel. Rife with secrets, intrigue, and serpentine twists.” — Paulette Kennedy, bestselling author of Parting the Veil

Threadbare by Jane Loeb Rubin

Threadbare recounts the story of an innocent but tenacious young girl who chooses marriage to Abe, a lonely widower, rather than follow her farming community north as urban development transforms rural Harlem. Convinced Abe will help her attend high school on the Lower East Side, she faces a rude awakening to the filth and disease of the tenements. Through the ensuing decades, Tillie turns her energy and intelligence to partnering with Abe as he builds a thriving button business while she and her neighbor Sadie launch a unique garment company. Pushing back against the anti-Semitic Victorian values dominating the time, she acquires wealth only to have her life upended by a devastating, unforeseen challenge.

Louise and Vincent by Diane Byington

French innkeeper Louise Ravoux is struggling to keep her inn afloat while raising her two daughters and avoiding her abusive husband. One afternoon, a scruffy redheaded painter walks in, wanting to rent a room. Vincent van Gogh reminds her of her first love, and he has the most arresting eyes of anyone she’s ever seen. Though attracted to Vincent, Louise still bears the scars her husband gave her the only time she flirted with a man during their marriage. Still, something about Vincent makes her feel alive, and when she sees him painting outside, she stops to admire his work.

Louise gathers her courage and asks Vincent to give her painting lessons, and he agrees. She soon realizes that art and this man are calling her to change her life. Because of her husband’s temper and propensity for violence, Louise walks a dangerous path, but she’s determined to do whatever it takes to find a meaningful life and experience love.

Both a love story and a chronicle of a woman’s awakening, Louise and Vincent richly portrays the last months of one of the most iconic artists in history.

The Woman at the Wheel by Penny Ha

“Unfortunately, only a girl again.”

From a young age, Cäcilie Bertha Ringer is fascinated by her father’s work as a master builder in Pforzheim, Germany. But those five words, which he wrote next to her name in the family Bible, haunt Bertha.

Years later, Bertha meets Carl Benz and falls in love—with him and his extraordinary dream of building a horseless carriage. Bertha has such faith in him that she invests her dowry in his plans, a dicey move since they alone believe in the machine. When Carl’s partners threaten to withdraw their support, he’s ready to cut ties. Bertha knows the decision would ruin everything. Ignoring the cynics, she takes matters into her own hands, secretly planning a scheme that will either hasten the family’s passage to absolute derision or prove their genius. What Bertha doesn’t know is that Carl is on the cusp of making a deal with their nemesis. She’s not only risking her marriage and their life’s work, but is also up against the patriarchy, Carl’s own self-doubt, and the clock.

Like so many other women, Bertha lived largely in her husband’s shadow, but her contributions are now celebrated in this inspiring story of perseverance, resilience, and love.

Jaguars and Other Game by Brynn Barineau

1808 Rio de Janeiro. The Portuguese Court flees Napoleon to Brazil. For the first and only time in history, a European royal family transfers its capital to an American colony.

Maria Azevedo and her sister, Isabel, have spent years transporting gold through the jungle to Rio’s port. They can dispatch jaguars and smugglers with a crack of a whip, but the Prince Regent’s efforts to civilize the city have them looking over their shoulders. More soldiers. New laws. Full stocks.

Then the sisters’ childhood friend is wrongly imprisoned for murder.

Maria knows the only hope a Brazilian has for justice in the Court’s Rio is if someone drops the real murderer on the palace steps. The sisters recruit Victoria Cruz, a Portuguese refugee in service to Mad Queen Maria, and together they begin hunting a murderer through a city teeming with corruption.

The women soon discover a conspiracy that reaches the heart of the Portuguese court. To save their friend from execution, they’ll have to decide what they’re willing to risk for justice, love and family.

Never Let Go by Pamela Nowak

On the day the Santee Sioux attacked the isolated settlement on Lake Shetek, the white women who lived there had long since accepted their youthful dreams would never be realized. None knew they were about to become pawns in a struggle between cultures.

By day’s end, the five still alive recognized the challenges of their pasts were nothing compared to the strength it would take to survive nor that their views on what mattered most would be changed forever. One abandoned on the prairie with two small children, one left for dead, and three taken captive: these were not submissive wives simply following husbands. They endured and challenged, emerging strong and independent. This is their story … the story of who they were beneath the historical facts.

A Transcontinental Affair by Jodi Daynard

They boarded the train knowing their journey would make history. What they didn’t know was how profoundly it would change them.

May 1870. Crowds throng the Boston station, mesmerized by the mechanical wonder huffing on the rails: the Pullman Hotel Express, the first train to travel from coast to coast. Boarding the train are congressmen, railroad presidents, and even George Pullman himself. For two young women, strangers until this fateful day, it’s the beginning of a journey that will change their lives.

Sensitive Louisa dreads the trip, but with limited prospects, she’s reluctantly joined the excursion as a governess to a wealthy family. Hattie is traveling to San Francisco to meet her fiancé yet she’s far more interested in the workings of the locomotive than she is in the man awaiting her arrival. As the celebrated train moves westward, the women move toward one another, pulled by an unexpected attraction.

But there is danger in this closeness, just as there is in the wilds of the frontier and in the lengths the railroad men will go to protect their investments. Before their journey is over, Louisa and Hattie will find themselves very far from where they intended to go.

Parlor Games by Maryka Biaggio

It’s 1887, and eighteen-year-old May has ventured to Chicago in hopes of earning enough money to support her family. Yet when circumstances force her to take up residence at the city’s most infamous bordello, she chooses to use her feminine wiles to extract not only sidelong looks but also large sums of money from the men she encounters. Insinuating herself into high society, May lands a well-to-do fiancé-until, that is, a Pinkerton detective named Reed Doherty intervenes.

Reed makes it his mission to bring May to justice, and he pursues her across the world, from Shanghai to London and back, until he makes one last daring attempt to corner her. But May still has a few tricks up her sleeve… tricks that will prove she’s one tough woman to catch.

Norah, The Making of an Irish-American Woman in 19th-Century New York by Cynthia G. Neale

Follow the journey of Norah McCabe, a courageous young woman fleeing her Irish home devastated by famine and arriving in the rough and tumble world of New York City of the 1850s.  For the new immigrant every aspect of life is a challenge, negotiating a rapacious underworld, racism, poverty, and the struggle to find meaningful work.  But there are riches and opportunities here as well, and Norah is determined to thrive in her new country through grit, her skills as a dress maker, and her unshakable dream of a better life.

Meticulously researched, filled with voices of New York City’s multitudes, and tinged with romance, Cynthia Neale’s Norah offers a compelling heroine in the classic tradition of American immigrant stories.

Daughters of Green Mountain Gap by Teri M. Brown

Maggie McCoury, a generational healer woman, relies on family traditions, folklore, and beliefs gleaned from a local Cherokee tribe. Her daughter, Carrie Ann, believes her university training holds the answers. As they clash over the use of roots, herbs, and a dash of mountain magic versus the medicine available in the town’s apothecary, Josie Mae doesn’t know whom to follow. But what happens when neither family traditions nor science can save the ones you love most?

Daughters of Green Mountain Gap weaves a compelling tale of Maggie, Carrie Ann, and Josie Mae, three generations of remarkable North Carolina women living at the turn of the twentieth century, shedding light on racism, fear of change, loss of traditions, and the intricate dynamics within a family. Author Teri M. Brown skillfully navigates the complexities of their lives, revealing that some questions are not as easy to answer as one might think.

The River Remembers by Linda Ulleseit

Samantha Lockwood, Day Sets, and Harriet Robinson come to Fort Snelling from very different backgrounds. It’s 1835 and the world is changing, fast, and they are all struggling to keep up. After she refuses another suitor he’s chosen for her, Samantha’s father banishes her to live in the territory with her brother. He, too,tries to take over her marriage plans—but she is determined to find her own husband, even when her choices go awry.

Day Sets demands that her white husband create a school to educate their daughter, supporting her father’s belief that his people must learn the ways of the white man in order to ensure the tribe’s future. Until events prove her father wrong.

Harriet’s life in the territory is more like that of a free person than anywhere she’s lived. She even falls in love with Dred Scott and dreams of a life with him. But they are both enslaved, and she keeps being reminded of how little control she has over her own fate.

As their cultures collide, each of these three women must find a way to direct her own future and leave a legacy for her children.

Sweet Lavvy by Amanda Gale

A stranger in a cemetery, a tragic love story, a mystery unsolved…

On a blustery Maine winter’s morning, facing a monumental decision, Nick seeks solace by visiting his father’s grave, expecting to find the snow-covered cemetery deserted like every other day. Instead, he meets an old man who tells him the tale of Lavinia and Theodore, a passionate, peculiar romance between a shy young seamstress and her star-obsessed husband. After Theodore was lost at sea in 1857, Lavinia insisted he returned to her in ghostly form, and she lived out her days as if nothing had changed. The townspeople thought she was mad with grief, and they embraced her as the eccentric town widow. But when strange things began happening, things that couldn’t be explained, those closest to her wondered if she was telling the truth after all.

The encounter with this mysterious stranger leaves Nick questioning the wisdom of the decision he’s about to make. Though Lavinia is long gone, can her story help guide him in his own life?

Sweet Lavvy is a soulful novella of the sea, the stars, and the solstice. Quiet and romantic, and full of wandering ghosts, it’s about holding each other dear and love that never dies.

Castles in the Air by Sheila Myers

William and Ella Durant head towards an increasingly inevitable collision as they wrangle over their father’s legacy.

When their father, Doc Durant, dies, William and Ella are finally free of his domineering control and able to pursue their ambitions. William is now head of the family. Without his father’s ruthlessness and business savvy, he resorts to creative but dubious financial scheming to save what remains of the family fortune and fulfill his visions of grandeur for the Adirondack wilderness as a playground for the rich. Ella takes off for London to chase her own dream—to return to high society life, become a successful author, and mingle with literary giants. But she struggles to cope as William tightens the purse strings and restricts her freedom, while her feelings for a gallant and enigmatic French aristocrat turn into an obsession.

Eliza Waite by Ashley E. Sweeney

After the tragic death of her husband and son on a remote island in Washington’s San Juan Islands, Eliza Waite joins the throng of miners, fortune hunters, entrepreneurs, con men, and prostitutes traveling north to the Klondike in the spring of 1898. Using Gold Rush history, diary entries, and authentic pioneer recipes, Eliza Waite transports readers to a raucous and fleeting era of American history.

“Sweeney’s debut novel is a beautifully written work of historical fiction tracing one woman’s life in the wilds of nineteenth-century America. Readers will be immersed in Eliza’s world, which Sweeney has so authentically and skillfully rendered.” — Booklist