The Annotated Ornamental Women

Ornamental Women, my Gothic Fantasy novel (available here, if you have great taste in fiction) is chock full of allusions and references by design. I fundamentally believe that good genre fiction displays the author's fixations and interests in full regalia, so it's no surprise that my book is brimming over with the things that fascinate me. Victoriana fans will be eating especially well with my novel. Below, I'm going to annotate my own text and unveil my inspirations.Spoilers follow, of course, so you may want to consider reading Ornamental Woman before continuing. Then again, if spoilers don't bother you, what follows will give you a pretty good indication of whether my novel is the one for you. Either way, I'm not the boss of you.Gideon Morris and Joanna Rusk: a central plot point in Ornamental Women is that the artist Gideon Morris buried a book of love poems with his wife, Joanna, when she died--and then later wants to have the poems exhumed from her grave. This has its basis in…