Lamplighter
Lamplighter is a fact-based fictional story about a young French woman in a same-gender romance during the French Revolution through diary entries. As a lamplighter in Paris, the woman watched the Battle of Bastille and risked her life to help a stranger who would change her life. She met her life partner at university and relocated to Rome to study, narrowly escaping the Mount Vesuvius eruption in Naples. After the French and Italian troops clashed in Rome, they fled to watch the Battle of the Nile between Lord Nelson's English fleet and Bonaparte’s French navy.
Their visit to Lesvos, Mediterranean sailing, and meeting a polite Spanish pirate are recounted in the journals. In rainy Genoa, hundreds of creatures sought the dryness of their mansion, including a huge lynx. When Napoleon’s armies invaded Italy, Genoa authorities interrogated the woman, believing she was a spy. To escape the war in Europe while Napoleon tried to conquer the world, they went to Connecticut and taught at an all-female school to find and free women like themselves and several slaves. They vacationed in Puerto Rico for warmer weather and learned that the family of the man she assisted at Bastille, who died a martyr, revered her and that an incident changed their spirituality. After retiring, they would live comfortably.
This is the story of strong, well-educated, free-thinking women who believed in their education and love for one other and helped other women who loved only women during a time when religion had prejudiced opinions based on sloppy interpretations of religious texts.
