Immortality: A Love Story (The Anatomy Duology #2)

by Dana Schwartz

“Every woman marries into obsolescence,” Eliza said. “The things that make us celebrated as young women—being charming, and being coquettish and being clever? In a married woman and mother, all of that becomes desperate and embarrassing, like wearing too much rouge. Even our educations serve no purpose after we’re wed.

For a breath, Hazel hesitated. But only for a breath. She had disguised herself as a man and dissected corpses, dug graves and stolen bodies, faced an immortal doctor who had threatened to cut the heart out of the boy she loved. She had been in love, and she lost him and learned how to be alone again. Hazel could handle a dark flight of stairs.

“That America pretends to be a child of the Enlightenment and they still have people working as chattel. As property. They demanded liberation from the British Empire—for what? For freedom? If they had still been colonies of England, slavery would have been banned there a decade ago, same as the rest of the Empire.”

If a woman had any hope at all of living in the rarefied world of art or poetry, it was to be beautiful enough for a man to choose her as a muse. A muse was celebrated, sure, praised and feted, but she existed entirely at the mercy of her artist, who was placing her high on a pedestal so small it didn’t allow her to move more than a step in either direction lest she fall.

There was nothing she owed to Jack Currer, even if his memory persisted like moisture in the air after a storm.

There are always women behind the scenes, pulling the strings, Hazel. We are invisible to history, but we also survive.”