The remarkable story of Eliza Haycraft, a 19th-century brothel madam, is a piece of history that few remember outside of St. Louis, where she spent most of her life. Haycraft, born in 1820 in the Missouri township of Cote Sans Dessein, came to St. Louis alone and penniless. In time, however, she became one of the city’s wealthiest—and most notorious—citizens. Because Haycraft–who never learned to read or write–left no letters or personal papers, little is known about her life outside of newspaper accounts. Novelist Diana Dempsey, author of the Beauty Queen Mysteries, imagines the colorful life and times of the madam—and ardent feminist—in THE UNSTOPPABLE ELIZA HAYCRAFT, a work of historical fiction told from Haycraft’s perspective.
Eliza Haycraft’s rags-to-riches tale begins as she flees her husband, John, an adulterous scoundrel and bigamist. Taking John’s canoe, Eliza sets off down the Missouri River and soon winds up on a steamboat, where she meets the barrel-bodied Obadiah Darby, who becomes her lover and companion as she makes her way to New Orleans and eventually St. Louis, where she will remain for the rest of her life. As a young, illiterate woman with no means of support, Eliza is faced with a stark choice—starvation or prostitution—and winds up on the doorstep of Madam Lantos, from whom she learns the ropes of living and working in a brothel. Soon enough, Eliza rises to become a madam herself, running the first of the five brothels that will make her fortune. By the time of Eliza’s death, she will be a wealthy business owner—her estate would be worth nearly $30 million in today’s dollars—and a philanthropist, giving generously to support Civil War widows and orphans of soldiers.
Dempsey makes the most of the gaps in Eliza’s real-life story, filling her story with invented characters like Obadiah and Dr. Richard Bonner, who will become the love of her life. While these embellishments tend to steer the novel towards romance fiction territory—and shopworn tropes like the Grumpy Hot Man—Dempsey sticks as close to historical accounts as possible, appending the book with scholarly references as well as a section listing the real and fictional characters. Eliza Haycraft was an outcast from polite society who was buried in an unmarked grave, yet was so beloved that thousands of mourners attended her funeral.
Author Diana Dempsey’s admiration and affection for her subject shines throughout THE UNSTOPPABLE ELIZA HAYCRAFT, a beautifully written, compulsively readable tale that gives voice to this fascinating, larger-than-life figure from a neglected corner of history.
~Edward Sung for IndieReader