If you'd rather place an order by talking to one of our cheerful order desk clerks, please call 1-888-232-4444 (USA and Canada only) or 250-383-6864. From Europe, ring our UK order desk clerk at local rate number 0845 230 9601 (UK only) or 44 (0)1865 722 113.

Goodnight Eleanor

by Mary Margaret Bayer

355 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #04-2534; ISBN 1-4120-4726-9; US$28.50, C$32.00, EUR23.50, £16.50

The year is 1909, Seattle, Washington. Queen Victoria is gone and the nation is deciding whether it should be obedient to an era that no longer exists. Preserved in a young woman's diary, Eleanor wrote of the hardships, heartaches, and forbidden love that did exist.

Read more!

About the Book      About the Author      Excerpts      Catalogue Information

About the Book

Seattle was still a young city after having shaken the ashes from her skirts 20 years earlier from the Great Fire of 1889. While Seattle boasts of a 500-room brothel which caters to men's desires, holding hands is an entitled privilege of courtship. Beneath the harnesses of whale bone corsets and suspensory belts strapped across loins, a new generation cries, "What can we not be obedient to?" Queen Victoria has been dead for eight years. Social as well as impassioned undercurrents between men and women are unraveling and intensifying. While strait-laced notions are being taught on proper conduct while in the presence of real live men, and that beauty serves only to find husbands, the suffrage movement worries most men as it sweeps across the nation and Washington state.

One exception, being Nate Miller, who, after having carried the fainted Eleanor across the Fair grounds, finds her employed on Millionaire Row at his father's mansion. It would kill Nate to stay under his father's roof after a 14-year absence. It would kill him more if he could never see Eleanor again.

Financial family difficulties force Eleanor to leave her insurance company job for the deplorable position as "domestic" for the despised and hated Miller's who hold the mortgage on her family's house. It does not take Eleanor long to realize that Nate intends to wake and stimulate feelings and instincts and desires that if roused, are believed to become diseased. As morbidly sensitive as love is, Nate finds himself competing for it with another man - Eleanor's older brother, Richard, who is stricken with tuberculosis.

---

About the Author

Mary Margaret (a.k.a. Margie) McDermand arrived in this world along with a twin sister in Seattle, Washington on April 10, 196? -- must I? After nine years of childhood in Seattle, the family which consisted of six girls and one boy needed more room and moved to 20-acre farm in Maple Valley. Margie graduated from Tahoma High School and later from Highline Community College. In between those two establishments of education, life experiences included; working at a thoroughbred race track, waitressing, running a housekeeping business, volunteer fire fighting, and eventually, working at the Boeing Company where she met her husband, John Bayer. Married going on 15 years, and the mom of two boys, ages 10 and 12, Margie and her family currently live in Auburn, Washington.

The author enjoys bird watching, gardening, cooking, baking, and growing raspberries for jelly to give to family and unsuspecting friends such as the mail carrier. Up until recently, Ms. Bayer was a Cub Scout Leader and sang in her church's Folk Group.

For as long as the author can remember, she has always been the sentimental sort. As a youngster, the McDermand family descended upon Victoria, B.C., and there in one of the museums the author could hardly be removed from a certain exhibit. To the rest of the world it was perhaps just a bunch of "old stuff from a century ago," but to one young girl it was the beginning of a hard to explain association with a time period only know to great-grandparents. Again, as a teenager, while taking in the "Underground Tour of Seattle," (a preserved portion of Seattle after the Great Fire of 1889) while surrounded by old brick walls and dirt floors, the author was vividly aware of what was once there.

With a love for storytelling, a fascination with people, places and events, and needing a place to keep "family history in one place," and for reasons so stated above, Ms. Bayer's 2nd novel was inevitable. If someone were to ask what the author's definition of a job well done is, her answer would be this: when the emotions of the reader are roused to the point where characters are spoken as live breathing persons...forgetting that it was, after all, only a story. Or was it?

---

Excerpts

---

Catalogue Information

---