Goodreads asked Emily Midorikawa:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Emily Midorikawa Out of the Shadows is a group biography about six remarkable nineteenth-century women whose supposed ability to contact the dead brought them fame, fortune and astonishing levels of social and political influence. Funnily enough, though, the first spark of the idea came when I was researching my previous book, A Secret Sisterhood - another group biography, this time about female literary friendship. It was while I was poring over a collection of letters from Harriet Beecher Stowe to her pen-friend George Eliot that I came upon a reference to Kate Fox, a famous Victorian spirit medium. Stowe was a great believer in the power of spirit mediums while Eliot was much more sceptical. Although my way of thinking was closer to Eliot's than Stowe's, I was intrigued by Stowe's description of Fox and so I decided to find out more about this young woman. Researching Fox led me to other women of the period with apparently similar talents. I was fascinated to learn where these 'gifts' could take them: among the women that I'd eventually write about in Out of the Shadows are a hugely popular orator, a much celebrated legal campaigner and America's first female presidential candidate. Once I realised how rich their stories were, and the extent to which they had often been forgotten, I knew I had to write a book about these women.

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