When we first met Axie Muldoon, the heroine of Kate Manning’s daring page-turner My Notorious Life (Scribner), she is 12, one among hordes of hungry kids scrabbling for crumbs on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1860. Her father is dead, her one-armed mother is incapable of supporting her children, and Axie’s been forcibly separated from her younger siblings, Dutch and Joe, thanks to the good intentions of the Children’s Aid Society. Then she watches helplessly as her mother and newborn sister die soon after childbirth, which makes Axie’s eventual ascension–becoming the most famous midwife in New York City before turning 30–especially meaningful. Renaming herself Madame DeBeausacq, Axie journeys from dire poverty to a mansion on Fifth Avenue and scandalizes the city by providing her often desperate patients with “female pills” and abortions. When the hell-bent founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice tries to take her down, she comes roaring back. This extraordinary tale–narrated in a rough-and-tumble Irish brogue–was inspired by an actual 19th-century abortionist, Ann Trow Lohman, who was dubbed the Wickedest Woman in New York for her fierce advocacy of women’s health. Manning’s meticulously researched novel is both historical and astonishingly current, reminding us that there’s nothing new about the “one step forward, two steps back” nature of today’s debate about reproductive rights.
— Elisabeth Egan
