The Queen of the Platform

"Susan Higginbotham has a gift for telling the tales of strong women who stepped out from the shadows into which society's strictures would have cast them in order to make their indelible marks on history. . . . Weaving together sumptuous prose and groundbreaking research, Higginbotham delivers a read that is both empowering and important."

-Allison Pataki, New York Times bestselling author of Finding Margaret Fuller

From the award-winning author of The Stolen Crown and Hanging Mary comes a novel based on the life of the indomitable Ernestine Rose, whose fearless advocacy helped bring about the rights women enjoy today.

Question everything, Ernestine vows while growing up in a Poland ravaged by the Napoleonic wars. Accept nothing blindly.

Rejecting her rabbi father's religion and an arranged marriage, Ernestine strikes out on her own, arriving in New York in 1836. Distressed by the injustices around her, she takes to the public speaking platform, pressing for the abolition of slavery and for women's rights alongside activists like Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. But at a time when women are expected to confine themselves to the parlor and the hearth-and when an atheist is best advised to say nothing at all-is Ernestine's adopted country ready to hear her?

Following Ernestine through triumph and heartbreak and across two continents, The Queen of the Platform brings out of history's shadows a heroine who braved public scorn to fight for the values she held dear.