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Dorothea Graham Jensen
a book bubble about
A Buss from Lafayette
Teens
Author Insight
One Origin of this Story!
A few years ago I was doing some genealogy and found that one of my ancestors, in the early 19th century, married a woman who bore him several children but died a few years later. The widower then married his wife's sister. At the time, I wondered how the children felt about that. It seemed to me that it would be confusing, to say the least, to have an aunt turn into a stepmother. I created Clara and Priscilla to explore that situation. I think I found this interesting because through my Gilbert and Sullivan experience I knew that marrying a deceased wife's sister became illegal in the UK soon after this. It was considered incest! The issue was raised so often in parliament that in the Gilbert and Sullivan opera Iolanthe the Queen of the Fairies sings, “He shall prick that annual blister, Marriage with deceased wife’s sister”.
Book Excerpt
A Buss from Lafayette
My father’s new wife gave me this journal the day she married him, exactly one year ago. Before then, she was only my aunt Priscilla, a Boston old maid schoolmistress, no less. She is so very prim and proper that I call her “Prissy,” but inside my head—not to her face. That would just be courting trouble!
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