The Lazarus Brooch

Trudy Magwood lives and works in New York City as an underpaid and overworked clerk in a millinery shop in the first decade of the twentieth century. The initial ten years of the century is a time of vast technological and social change, but Trudy can neither appreciate nor participate in it, that is, not until an accident changes everything. After a fall, she awakens exactly one hundred years (or so it would seem) later in the familiar surroundings of her own apartment. But everything is different: her name, her roommates, her job, and most of all what she considers proper behavior and dress. Time travel is, of course, impossible, so our twenty-first century heroine, Lindsay Weleska, must have some mental issues. Her fantasy, she having feet in two centuries, is so real that she almost convinces the medical community that she is indeed two people.
She is eventually able to adjust to her new surroundings with the help of her roommates, co-workers, and a neurologist interested in her case, but after a particularly grueling night at the strip club where she works as a bartender, she returns home only to wake up back in 1910. She imagines (or is it real?) that she is once again Trudy Magwood. She meets two people there that will profoundly influence the course of her life. One is Count Casmir Weleska, a Polish expatriate, who romances Trudy and shows her how the privileged live.
The other prominent person she meets is Margaret Ralston, a fiery suffragette and ardent advocate for women’s rights. Margret enlists Trudy in the cause and she becomes Margaret’s right hand man…uh, woman. After a particularly raucous march to City Hall, Margaret and Trudy are jailed for their civil disobedience, sentenced to ninety days, and sent to a workhouse in Upper New York State to serve their time. They are housed in an unheated space with a pail for a toilet and are fed only bread and water (this is actually how these women were treated during these times). Trudy cannot take the regimen and faints dead away. The only doctor that the authorities can find is a local veterinarian, and he quickly determines that she is pregnant. Trudy is sent Syracuse under house arrest for the remainder of her sentence.
When she returns to the City, Madam Weleska tells her that Europe is in turmoil, particularly the Slavic States, and that their estates have stopped performing, so Casmir has gone back to Poland to try to see what was going on. He never returns, and Trudy becomes an impoverished single mother living with the equally indigent Madam Weleska. Trudy reluctantly reconnects with Margaret and is eventually killed during a suffragette demonstration in Midtown. Her death frees Lindsay to better adjust to life in the twenty-first century.
Now that she is back in the 2000’s, Lindsay returns to her job as a bartender and continues her therapy with her neurologist, Dr. Jonathan Feletti. Treatment for her mental issues leads to an emotional bond between doctor and patient and romance soon follows. But Lindsay has learned a lesson form Trudy’s liaison with Count Weleska, so she keeps things chaste. The story continues with Lindsay’s struggle to erase Trudy’s memory. Then one day Dr. Feletti takes Lindsay to Poland where he is to give the keynote speech at a worldwide conference of neurologists, and it is there that she eventually resolves the conflict between her Polish ancestry, her restrained love for the good doctor, and the specter of Trudy by using the Lazarus Broach in a unique twist.