The Madigans

Miriam Michelson was a feminist force to be reckoned with. She was a brazen, liberated woman who broke gender barriers in the journalistic profession, covering crime and politics for San Francisco's top dailies throughout the 1890s, a decade that relegated most female reporters to the soft news of the so-called "Woman's Page." She went on to become one of the early 20th century's most commercially successful fiction writers, supporting herself by publishing short stories in a range of mass circulation magazines, including Century, Ainslee's, The Smart Set, and the Ladies' Home Journal. Throughout Michelson's 40-year career, her interest remained with the imaginary adventures of audacious women making it on their own. Virginia City figures prominently in Michelson's second, admittedly autobiographical novel, The Madigans (1904), a devilish romp about a sextet of trouble-making sisters, and is the subject of her only full-length work of nonfiction.