My Notorious Life

A brilliant rendering of a scandalous historical figure, Kate ManningâÈçs My Notorious Life is an ambitious, thrilling novel introducing Axie Muldoon, a fiery heroine for the ages. AxieâÈçs 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 âÈêLunar Tablets for Female ComplaintâÈë into a thriving midwifery business. Flouting convention and defying the law in the name of womenâÈçs 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 âÈêtrust me.âÈë When her services attract outraged headlines, Axie finds herself on a collision course with a crusading officialâÈ'Anthony Comstock, founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. It will take all of AxieâÈçs 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 âÈêthe Wickedest Woman in New York,âÈë My Notorious Life is a mys­tery, a family saga, a love story, and an exquisitely detailed portrait of nineteenth-century America. Axie MuldoonâÈçs inimitable voice brings the past alive, and her story haunts and enlightens the present.