Good afternoon everyone,

HUGE FEM FRI WEEK UPCOMING, because next week dear friend of Fem Fri E. Saxey's first novel is available to all! I read an early version of this book, and it was honestly pretty creepy (i.e., good) and they then worked on making it even scarier, and now you can read it and feel the creeping dread I know you need this summer. Isn't it lovely to be sitting on a beach, feeling warm and safe, while what you are reading causes the chill hand of fear to enter your soul. Kind of like an emotional Baked Alaska. Pre-order here, you will love it.

Their novel is set in a wealthy Victorian Jewish family, so of course I looked into interesting Victorian Jewish women for you. Here is one! Judith Montefiore wrote the first Jewish cookbook in English. No recipes online but apparently at one point she goes a bit "fruit tarts are very easy to make. Why are you even reading a page entitled FRUIT TARTS". So that's Judith Montefiore's advice - make fruit tarts. 👍

Judith was born into a wealthy Jewish family and married into another. She and her husband, Moses, were passionate about their faith and education and they traveled and worked together to achieve their shared goals. But the cookbook, titled The Jewish Manual: or Practical Information in Jewish & Modern Cookery; with a Collection of Valuable Recipes and Hints Relating to the Toilette has always been associated with Judith alone. In her introduction, Judith tells us she wrote it “to guide the young Jewish housekeeper in the luxury and economy of ‘The Table,’ on which so much of the pleasure of social intercourse depends.”

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/food/articles/recipe-for-connection-judith-montefiore-cookbook

If you have preordered Saxey's book, but can't wait that long to be scared, how about a creepy short by Victorian Mary Wilkins Freeman to get you in the mood FOR FEAR?

By the end of the 1880s, Mary Eleanor Wilkins had become one of America’s most popular short story writers, publishing nearly fifty selections for Harper’s several periodicals and collecting many of them in two book publications. In 1902, the year she married Charles Manning Freeman and moved to his sprawling home in New Jersey, she wrote “Luella Miller,” which describes a local woman who saps the life out of everyone who cares for her and features the narrator Lydia Anderson, whose “thoughts were clothed in the rude vernacular of her native village.”

https://loa.org/news-and-views/1672-mary-wilkins-freeman-luella-miller

Story here:

https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Freeman_Luella_Miller.pdf

👻,

Alex.