Margaret K. Nelson's "Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers"

Margaret K. Nelson is A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Sociology Emerita, Middlebury College. Her books include, among others, Sociology Meets Memoir (2024), Farm and Wilderness Summer Camps: Progressive Ideals in the 20th Century, with Emily K. Abel (2023), Keeping Family Secrets: Shame and Silence in Memoirs from the 1950s (2022), and Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times (2012).

Nelson applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers: Jewish Life in Small-Town Vermont, with the following results:

The very top of page 99 ties up an account of why Abraham Cohen remained in Vergennes, Vermont when his wife moved to the nearby city of Burlington. The middle section, about Minne and Aaron Cohen is more complete:

Minnie Shuchman Cohen and seven children … arrived in New York City in 1913 and traveled directly to Burlington, where Aaron had bought them a house at 265 North Winooski Avenue (a five-minute walk from the house Abraham subsequently bought for his family). … Aaron settled his family in Burlington while he continued to live and work in Vergennes for four more years.

The bottom paragraph begins to tell the story of yet another couple, Rose and Alec Jacob Abramoff who remained married but lived separately.

Is page 99 representative of this book? Well, yes and no. On the “yes” side, the page offers detailed information including the names of both men and women, the years in which these people immigrated to the United States, the places they lived, the occupations of the men, and the domestic arrangements within their families. The level of thoroughness – drawn from newspapers, public records, and interviews with descendants – is characteristic of the book as a whole. But on the “no” side, the page gives no indication that the people were Jewish and that the place Aaron lived was a very small town. Indeed, this page focuses on the women who left their husbands (and the reasons for their leaving) while even as they continued to be married, rather than revealing anything about the generations of Jewish people who stayed and built their lives in the small towns of New England.

By the time the name of Abraham Cohen appears on page 99, the reader will know him well as a Jewish immigrant who was a junk dealer for over forty years. The reader will also know Abraham Cohen’s brother-in-law, Max Fishman, another Jewish immigrant who, by way of contrast, spent his life first as an itinerant peddler and then as the owner of a successful dry goods store that remained in business for almost 100 years. Both men lived, and worked in the same small town of Vergennes, Vermont. In subsequent chapters their relatives – including their wives, children, and grandchildren – will also come alive through my discussion of how Jewish people were integrated into places in which they constituted but a tiny minority. The conclusion compares the trajectories of Jews who settled in small-town Vermont at the dawn on the twentieth century with those who arrived three-quarters of a century later.

Learn more about Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers at the NYU Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Parenting Out of Control.

The Page 99 Test: Like Family.

The Page 99 Test: Keeping Family Secrets.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew B. Kennedy's "Rebellious Follower"

Andrew B. Kennedy is Associate Professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University, an M.A. in Law and Diplomacy from Tufts University, and B.S. in Psychology from Duke University. Prior to his academic career, he worked as a consultant, journalist, and teacher in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Washington, D.C.

Kennedy applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Rebellious Follower: China's Search for Science, Technology, and Innovation, and shared the following:

Page 99 may be found in the middle of Chapter 5, “The Balancing Act.” The chapter explores how China’s reformist leaders started experimenting with a more balanced approach to science and technology in the 1980s, chipping away at state planning and allowing more room societal initiative. Page 99 notes how challenging and problematic these changes were. “While the creation of a foundation system created new opportunities for scientists,” it notes, “the liberalization of prices and salary disparities made careers in basic science unappealing.” While small startup firms emerged, “the private sector was still nascent and remained vulnerable to discrimination.” The program to create China’s own technology clusters along the lines of Silicon Valley “suffered from considerable ‘mission drift’ over time.” The passage concludes by putting these challenges in perspective: “expanding society-led S&T in a Leninist political system accustomed to central planning was bound to be fraught.” More encouragingly, it adds that it was “striking how much change China’s leaders introduced in a relatively short period of time.”

Overall, the Page 99 Test works rather well for Rebellious Follower. Readers opening the book to this page would quickly understand that the book is a deep dive into how China’s policies toward science, technology, and innovation have evolved over time. In fact, page 99 highlights a number of key changes at an important moment. Readers would also perceive that the book is concerned both with China’s changing approach and with the challenges and contradictions these changes have wrought.

One page can only say so much, of course, and readers would need to start with Chapter 1 to appreciate the full scope of the book and its argument. The story really starts in the 19th century, when imperialist incursions brought the concept of science to China in the first place. Debates over how to respond have animated Chinese policymaking ever since. In the 1950s, China embraced state-led science planning, inspired by the Soviet Union, but Chairman Mao Zedong soon tired of this approach. In the 1960s, therefore, Mao’s Cultural Revolution touted “mass science” as the path to salvation – a remarkable challenge to more traditional elitist conceptions of what science was. Following Mao’s death, a more elitist approach returned, but departures from state-led planning soon followed. In the 1990s, China began to embrace not only science and technology, but also innovation, and the country’s “innovation system” became a new focal point for policymaking. In the 21st century, China’s leaders have developed an “innovation system with Chinese characteristics,” one in which a resurgent party-state plays a critical guiding role.

Throughout this winding history, Chinese leaders have shown a deep and abiding interest in foreign ideas about how science, technology, and innovation work. Yet they have also repeatedly challenged these ideas, either resisting them or adapting them as they have sought to reconcile imported belief systems with local ideologies. Simply put, China’s leaders have followed foreign ideas closely, but they have been remarkably rebellious followers.

Learn more about Rebellious Follower at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Terra Ziporyn and Amy R. Wolfson's "Educating the Exhausted"

Terra Ziporyn is the Executive Director and cofounder of Start School Later and author of numerous books on health and medicine, including The Harvard Guide to Women’s Health. Amy R. Wolfson is a professor of psychology at Loyola University Maryland and a leading scholar of adolescent sleep health.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Educating the Exhausted: Adolescent Sleep and the Struggle for a Later School Start, and reported the following:

Page 99 of our book, Educating the Exhausted: Adolescent Sleep and the Struggle for a Later Start, gives a compelling example of the challenges sleep researchers, like one of the authors, Amy R. Wolfson, ran into when they tried to convince school districts (translate adolescent sleep research into policy to benefit teens), in this case Worcester, MA (where the author was from at the time), and Seekonk, MA to set developmentally appropriate middle and high school start times. We note on page 99,

From the 1990s through 2019 they worked tirelessly to delay Worcester’s school start times. The school committee was still actively discussing potential plans as recently as 2021. Neighboring Shrewsbury at last voted to delay school start times for the 2023-24 school year…as have several other school districts…. Nonetheless, Worcester’s high schools still start at 7:20am.

As you will come to appreciate in our book, as captured on page 99, we learned early on that this was going to be an uphill battle – translating clear science on adolescent sleep and circadian health into meaningful school start times for youth. While the school district stories discussed in chapter 5, “Early Efforts to Delay School Start Times,” took place towards the 1990s and the early years of the 21st C, our book will draw you into understanding why research evidence on its own does not ensure that all school districts set school start times that allow for sufficient and regular sleep needed for optimal health and mental health. Our book both reviews the science of adolescent sleep health, historic disconnect between school start times and sleep research, early and ongoing efforts to set guardrails for age-appropriate school start times, perceived and actual hurdles, significance of the founding of the non-profit, Start School Later, and ultimately what it will take to sunset the start school later movement? Hence, Educating the Exhausted, not only captures the consequences of exhaustion for our teens and our society, but also how we have contributed to that exhaustion in decisions we’ve made about our schools and how we can address that exhaustion and its consequences by ensuring that strong science informs healthy public policy. Readers will come to understand exactly why our colleagues, friends, students, and communities have been tirelessly working to “educate the exhausted” for over three decades.

Visit Terra Ziporyn's website and Amy R. Wolfson's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tad Tuleja's "Skirmishes with Patriotism"

Tad Tuleja is a folklorist, songwriter, and former college writing instructor. The author of thirty books and numerous scholarly papers on American folk and popular traditions, he is also the editor of Different Drummers: Military Culture and Its Discontents and, with Eric A. Eliason, of Warrior Ways: Explorations in Modern Military Folklore.

Tuleja applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Skirmishes with Patriotism: Looking for America in the Long Shadow of Vietnam, with the following results:

Sixty years ago, at 24, I declined my government’s invitation to fight in Vietnam. I did so for what I believed were moral reasons, yet saying “the right No” to the war was a decision that had me asking myself for decades not only “Did I do the right thing?” but also “What if I had gone there?” Skirmishes with Patriotism began as an attempt to answer those questions. But the tale grew in the telling, and the book became a meditation that tries to work out more generally how manhood and nationalism come together around the noble infatuation we call patriotism. Ultimately it grapples with the question “What does it mean to say you love your country?”

The story begins in the Eisenhower 1950s, when I was a Boy Scout and the son of a U.S. naval officer. The book’s first half tracks my journey from that trusting childhood to the late 1960s when, having escaped the war, I spent some time in Paris and London. When I came home in 1971, I wrote an essay for Chicago Review entitled “Notes on a Homecoming.” On page 99 of Skirmishes, I reflect on that essay. It’s an appropriate glance at the book, for it shows an old man critiquing the certainties of his youth—the same critique that drives the book overall. Here’s the text of page 99:

On the facing page of my [Homecoming] essay, a French news photo shows an old Vietnamese woman aiming a rifle while a young woman corrects her technique. Are these the freedom-loving peasants we are there to protect, or a pair of VC irregulars with GIs in their sights? There is no way to tell from the picture, and that tells us something dreadful about the war: It erased the line between our friends and our enemies.

Yet this fact seems barely visible to the young radical-in-exile. He is talking of the war as a political evil, not as a place where people point rifles at each other. He is aware, fleetingly, that there are people involved. Not the Vietnamese: They are never mentioned in this diatribe on the war. But there are Americans there, in those “rows of dead soldiers.” In the first pages of the piece, as he sits in the sun playing Hemingway, he is aware of these men. “Comfortable in my cafes, wined, dined, and anodyned,” he imagines the faces of “young men like me who, unlike me, will not return.” It’s a small but telling moment of awareness. Even while riding the winds of smug outrage, he is able to recall, for a second, the break he’s been given.

I am speaking of this young man now as if he is alive, and as if, even stranger, he is not me. That is a way of creating a salutary distance, of owning and yet not owning these decades- old words. Yet it was some version of “I” who set them down. And they spoke some truth to the reality I saw then, to the power and the abuse of power that embroiled my world. I wish I could say I was more concerned with our soldiers than is suggested by the hint of “young men like me.” But that was a mission failed which has taken me most of my life to come back around to. It is part of why my “right No” is still a weight to be borne.

Saigon fell on the last day of April 1975. Within hours, American TV screens aired film of the victors’ tanks rumbling through the streets of the capital—soon to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City—and of civilians scrambling for space on the Air America helicopters that were spiriting people away from an anticipated bloodbath. The war that had torn us apart was over. We watched its final twitches in sick satisfaction.

In the second half of Skirmishes, I track my engagement with Vietnam and with patriotism from that grim April day to the present. In trying to understand what the war I hated felt like to the young Americans who fought it, I drew on the memoirs of fine writers like Philip Caputo, Tobias Wolff, Tim O’Brien, and Karl Marlantes. And I came to see that it was not impossible to reconcile a hatred of war with respect for soldiers. Respect especially for the sacrifices that they make “for God and country.”

The final chapters of Skirmishes move beyond the battlefield to the home front, where as I said in a song written decades after the war, “Elders write the contracts while children close the deal.” Writing this memoir eased the burden I’d carried for decades while convincing me that George Orwell had it right when he said the worst of war propaganda, “all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.” Something to remember the next time somebody with a flag pin and no uniform tells you our latest “patriotic” adventure is worth service members’ lives.

Visit Tad Tuleja's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ankita Pandey's "Becoming Allies"

Ankita Pandey is Associate Professor, Jindal School of International Affairs, O.P. Jindal Global University, India, and Research Associate at St Antony's College, the University of Oxford.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Becoming Allies: Civil Liberties Activism in India, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Becoming Allies opens onto one of the book's central concerns: the quiet, painstaking work of fact-finding by civil liberties activists. The practice is about independent investigations into police violence and abuse of power by state officials. But more broadly this practice is part of the larger ongoing contestation over who gets to tell the story of injustice? This page is in a chapter that explores activist fact-finding as a political act.

The page notes that the work of civil liberties teams was to uncover facts, and to unsettle official truths. Their reports showed how ordinary legal procedures could become instruments of injustice. Words such as "and others", in a police complaint could leave several unnamed people vulnerable to future arrest. Fact finding revealed that official records failed to match eyewitness accounts. Procedures were ignored, rewritten, or invented after the event. The fact-finding reports by civil liberties activists asked: why were people arrested who had never been at the scene? Why was live ammunition used before less violent measures were exhausted? The struggle, the page suggests, was over who possessed the authority to say what had happened.

Would a reader who stumbled upon page 99 grasp the essence of the book?

In many ways, yes. They would encounter one of its recurring themes: democracy depends on those who patiently investigate, document, and amplify the voices of others. Fact-finding is one of the principal ways the allies in this book practised politics. Yet page 99 might make a casual reader assume the book is about human rights investigations alone. It is not. It is about the practices of people who undertake such work, and the distinctive political role they play. Becoming Allies asks: why do some people raise awareness around injustices that they do not have a direct stake in? It follows the practices of lawyers, judges, journalists, academics and other concerned citizens who defended political prisoners, documented communal violence, supported labourers, and stood beside marginalised communities.

Seeing these people as allies shifts our attention from a bi-polar conflict between movements and the state to the relationships that connect them. The book develops the ideas of ally activism and the politics of amplification to show how local struggles become public causes, and how voices travel beyond the places where they first emerged.

If page 99 offers a glimpse of one practice, the book asks readers to notice the invisible labour of those who gather the testimonies, preserve the evidence, carry stories across institutions and refuse to let injustice disappear into silence.

Learn more about Becoming Allies at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Barbara Ganson's "Lady Daredevils"

Barbara Ganson is a professor of history at Florida Atlantic University. She is a guest curator at the Glenn L. Martin Maryland Aviation Museum and a private pilot. Her books include Texas Takes Wing: A Century of Flight in the Lone Star State.

Ganson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Lady Daredevils: American Women and Early Aviation, and reported the following:

On the half page numbered 99, there is an illustration of altitude record setter Ruth Blaney Alexander in San Diego, in 1929. She is smiling while sitting in the cockpit of her airplane with a stuffed animal dog mascot and a bouquet of beautiful flowers. Below the image, I quote her endearing letter she wrote to her third husband, which sheds light on her emotional state before her departure to return home to Kansas. She left behind her wedding ring and might have been considering leaving him. Another letter she left for her parents to be opened only in case of death, asking them "not to wish her back," because she has gone on to a happier life and will wait for them there. She then mentions that the "way of life is hilly" and right then she was at the bottom of one of the hills and the next one looked tough to her. Ruth Blaney Alexander mentions "she had the promise of a ship, gas, and an engine but no money to back her flights," but somehow, “she would manage.”

The letters she left behind for her loved ones allow the reader to understand how aviators dealt with the realty of flying at a time when things could and often went terribly wrong during the early years of flight.

Overall, page 99 well represents the book which aims to describe and analyze the experiences of lesser-known (and well known) women aviators. It illustrates well the depth of my research, as these are rare letters.

Learn more about Lady Daredevils at the University of Illinois Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ann Blair's "In the Scholar’s Workshop"

Ann Blair is the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor in the Department of History at Harvard University. Her books include Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age and (with Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton) Information: A Short History.

Blair applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, In the Scholar’s Workshop: Hidden Histories of Collaboration and Authorship, with the following results:

Page 99 plunges us into chapter 2 (“Invisible and visible”) and a central theme of the book: the general invisibility but occasional visibility of the “little people” on whose help authors and scholars often relied in composing texts and preparing them for publication. I focus here on examples from Renaissance Europe 1500-1650, but I expect that these patterns apply to other contexts too.

In the Renaissance the conventions of authorship in print and in iconography emphasized the author as a single name on a title page and a solitary figure working with his papers and books. Learned books often included a number of paratexts (e.g. preface, dedicatory epistle, table of contents, index) but there was no equivalent to the acknowledgments section that we expect today. In fact authors and scholars typically relied on the help of young men they hired or on live-in students or even family members to help them by taking dictation, reading, finding references, making copies of texts, among other tasks. But these amanuenses (singular: amanuensis, for “hand-servant”) remain hidden from view in the final printed product that they helped to create. The main exception to this pattern of invisibility occurred when authors sought to pin the blame on their helpers for errors or shortcomings that the reader might encounter. The author did not name the helpers, but acknowledged their existence by asking the reader to “please excuse the errors of my amanuenses.” A more elaborate version invoked a thieving servant who would seek to publish the stolen text, thus forcing the author to rush into print with his text in order to forestall a dishonest and inaccurate edition by the servant. I argue that these two tropes were an innovation of the age of print, which I call the “servant function.” Why did they originate in Renaissance Europe?

As I explain on page 99, printing was a source of anxiety for the author:

The attraction of getting one’s work into print was precisely to spread one’s reputation far across space and time, but the risk of an unfavorable reception was also heightened by the prospect of broad distribution beyond the author’s control. The context of confessional conflict in the sixteenth century further raised the stakes of a negative reception, since there were constant tensions and shifting distributions of power not only among the main rival confessions but also within each of them as factions within the Catholic and the several Protestant churches vied for power. Authors who miscalculated the impact of their book could face devastating consequences, hence the virtues of the servant function to relieve the author of some of this anxiety and responsibility.

This early modern move is the opposite of today’s acknowledgments in which authors thank those who helped by name and take responsibility for any errors as their own.

The book investigates the relationships between amanuensis and principal in other historical contexts (ch. 1) along other thematics axes too—mechanical vs intellectual work (ch. 3), attribution of authorship (ch. 4), and the management of posthumous papers (ch. 5).

Learn more about In the Scholar’s Workshop at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Too Much to Know.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sergey Gavrilets's "Social Influence and the Logic of Collective Action"

Sergey Gavrilets is Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Mathematics at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. He is the author of Fitness Landscapes and the Origin of Species.

Gavrilets applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Social Influence and the Logic of Collective Action, and shared the following:

Page 99 falls in the chapter “Dynamics of Social Influence.” It begins with a figure showing adoption curves in the classic Bass model of innovation diffusion, which combines influence from external authorities with influence from peers. The page emphasizes that “even a relatively weak effect of external influence ... can significantly speed up the spread of the innovation.” It then notes how the model can incorporate individual differences and network interactions before turning to the classic Daley-Kendall model of rumor spread, which adapts ideas from epidemic models.

The Page 99 Test works reasonably well for my book, although it works better as a sample of the book’s approach than as a summary of its full argument. The page captures one of its central concerns: how individual behavior spreads through a population under the combined influence of authorities and peers. It also illustrates the book’s typical strategy: begin with a simple formal model, explain its intuition, visualize its consequences, and then connect it to related models and possible extensions.

At the same time, a browser reading only this page might conclude that the book is mainly about the diffusion of innovations and rumors. Its larger subject is collective action: why groups sometimes solve shared problems and sometimes fail, even when cooperation would benefit everyone. The book asks who contributes and who free-rides, why people punish violators or follow leaders, how norms emerge and change, and when small behavioral shifts can produce large social transformations.

My central argument is that no single mechanism can adequately explain collective action. Material incentives matter, but so do personal attitudes and moral values, beliefs about what others will do, social norms, peer influence, cultural authorities, cognition, learning, and individual differences. The book brings insights from game theory, behavioral economics, evolutionary theory, psychology, and cultural evolution into a common framework. This framework shows how actions, attitudes, and beliefs can coevolve and reinforce one another, sustaining cooperation but also trapping groups in persistent collective failure. It also helps identify tipping points, explain why apparently ineffective institutions endure, and clarify when interventions by leaders, authorities, or committed minorities can redirect a group’s trajectory.

Page 99 therefore reveals an important engine of the book - social influence operating through nonlinear population dynamics - but not the full machine. It gives a good taste of how the book thinks, but only a partial map of what it explains.

Visit Sergey Gavrilets's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Greg Garrett's "White Lies"

Greg Garrett is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture at Baylor University and Canon Theologian for the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris, France. He has published over thirty books, including The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America's Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity (2023) and A Long, Long Way: Hollywood's Unfinished Journey from Racism to Reconciliation (2020).

Garrett applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, White Lies: Dismantling Ten Cultural Myths About Race, and reported the following:

Page 99 of White Lies is a virtual cornucopia of themes and ideas about the power of racial myths to create a caste system and to diminish those who are not white Christian males. On that page, I wrestle with the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admission decision striking down race-based admissions to institutions of higher ed, and with the hypocritical suggestion from Supreme Court justices including Clarence Thomas that racial discrimination is a thing of the past.

In the process, I dig into the truth that since we are a multi-cultural multi-racial nation we will have to reckon with these differences. I use James Baldwin’s seminal essay “The Stranger in the Village” as a way to address how America must confront race and difference, since the Black American is “not a visitor to the West, but a citizen there, an American; as American as the Americans who despise him.”

The page—which is also the concluding page in a chapter about the myth of white Americans celebrating that at least they aren’t Black—ends with how white americans have created myths to keep Black people in their place, to enforce white supremacy, including the simple idea that race can differentiate between two people in identical economic situations by race. “Systems that were created to make people miserable make people miserable,” I write, “and thus has the racial caste system functioned in America.”

Page 99 of my White Lies is a remarkable confirmation of the book’s larger thesis that racial myths shape the way we think, live, and believe. This page 99 offers an incredibly dense summation of the creation of a racial caste system in America and cites Isabel Wilkerson, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, James Baldwin, and theologian Maria Power, and presents a call to action on the myth that we can and should use race to set up who in America matters and who does not.

The largest section of page 99 is a discussion of James Baldwin’s seminal essay “The Stranger in the Village,” which appeared in his first book, Notes of a Native Son. I have argued in a previous book on Baldwin (The Gospel according to James Baldwin) that his experience visiting a Swiss alpine village that had never seen a Black man helped him formulate many of his most important understandings about race. The villagers saw him as exotic. The children wanted to touch his nappy hair. But as he notes, white men in the West (Baldwin divided his time between France and the United States) do not have the luxury of looking upon him as a stranger.

Baldwin—and the villagers of Leukerbad—knew that eventually he would go back down the mountain, and they did not have to deal with him. But for those in the Western democracies, for those in his native United States, the question of the Black person could not be ignored. Either white people would have to acknowledge the shared humanity of the Black person, or everything might fall apart.

I’m particularly happy with my closing paragraph, which is not only the last paragraph on page 99, but the last paragraph of my chapter “At Least We’re Not Black.” It notes how our history has leaned into this harmful myth (often at the detriment of poor whites, who might have more in common with Black Americans than with wealthy whites), and makes an explicit connection to white Christian nationalism, which I write about at length in the book, which has taken and is daily leaning into the idea of a racist caste system that enthrones them to the detriment of everyone else.

Well done, Page 99 Challenge. With White Lies, you absolutely nailed it!

Follow Greg Garrett on Facebook and Substack.

The Page 99 Test: Entertaining Judgment.

Writers Read: Greg Garrett (June 2017).

The Page 99 Test: Living with the Living Dead.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marina Cano's "Theatrical Afterlives"

Marina Cano is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Valencia. She has taught at universities in Scotland, Ireland and Norway. She is the author of Jane Austen and Performance (2017), and the co-editor of Jane Austen and William Shakespeare: A Love Affair in Literature, Film and Performance (2019). More recently, she has co-edited the collection Women, "Failure" and Academia: Activism, Creativity and Critique in the Contemporary University (2026).

Cano applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Theatrical Afterlives: Nineteenth-Century Women's Novels on the Stage, with the following results:

I open my book, Theatrical Afterlives, in search of that potentially defining page, page 99. I am thrilled to discover that it falls on one of my favourite chapters: Chapter 3, “Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford in Suffrage Times.” How exciting!

This chapter explores dramatic productions of Gaskell’s best-known, best-loved novel by groups of suffragettes, and argues that such dramatic offspring sheds light on the novel itself, by making readers aware of its potentially pro-suffrage verve. This links back to the argument of the book as a whole: that the theatrical afterlives of nineteenth- century women’s novels are a prism through which we can look back at the novels, and that, when we do so, we discover different shapes and colours—like with a kaleidoscope.

But, first of all, what exactly is going on here? Page 99 contains part of my discussion of how Miss Pole, one of the formidable spinsters that inhabit the town of Cranford, can be read as a suffragette foremother. The section starts on page 98, so by page 99 we are still at the beginning of the discussion. On page 98, I have been laying out how suffrage actresses, members of the suffrage group Actresses’ Franchise League (AFL), played the character of Miss Pole with heightened aggressivity at the International Suffrage Fair of 1912. By page 99, I turn from the stage to the page to seek what basis there is for such rendition in Gaskell’s novel.

I explore, for example, one of Miss Pole’s speeches in Chapter 10 of the novel, where she claims to know the male sex really well. She knows that men wish “to be considered Samson and Solomon rolled into one.” After all, “My father was a man, and I know the sex pretty well.” On this, I claim that “Gaskell’s Miss Pole appears here as an activist and feminist protester, criticising that sacrosanct system of Victorian authority: patriarchy, and especially parental rule.” Her speech, in fact, is motivated by an encounter with the local doctor, Mr Hoggins, who, Miss Pole claims, has been mugged by a group of robbers, an incident he repeatedly denies (rightly, as it turns out).

So, to go back to the Page 99 Test, is this page representative of the book as a whole? v To my surprise, the answer is yes. The page starts with the sentence “The use of the qualifying adverb ‘even’ points to the connections between Cranford the novel, Cranford the dramatizations and the suffrage movement.” Here I am close reading a review of the AFL’s performance of Cranford. I then turn to the novel to unpick some of these connections between the stage and the page (through the Mr Hoggins discussion and Miss Pole’s aggressivity).

Interestingly, the end of the page takes us back to the stage, to the Cranford productions by the AFL and the WFL (Women’s Freedom League). Page 99 concludes by further exploring the connections between Miss Pole, Gaskell’s character, and the WFL, one of the radical groups of suffrage fighters. To reinforce the connection, I quote the WFL’s call to arms, and make the point that it retrospectively resonates with Miss Pole’s own aggressive harangue in the novel: “To arms, Freedom Leaguers! The thought of our tortured prisoners of war should…” This is where page 99 ends, in the midst of the WFL’s rallying cry.

Now this dance—from the stage to the page and back to the stage and its historical context—is representative of the book as a whole and of the key strands that the book weaves together. It is also representative of its key ideas: these theatrical productions tell us something about the reception history of nineteenth-century novels by British women writers (in this case, that Gaskell and her novel had an eventful afterlife among suffrage fighters and players).

But the plays also uncover something about the novels that has largely gone unnoticed, some socially progressive undercurrent: the pro suffrage sympathies of Cranford in this case, a novel that Gaskell wrote in the 1840s, when the movement for the female vote was budding in England. (Gaskell herself corresponded with some suffragettes and supported their journalistic endeavours). After all, in Gaskell’s Cranford, women are enfranchised already: they are the sole homeowners in town and make all local decisions. They are the “Amazons” that the narrator, half-jokingly, describes them as, at the start of the novel.

Other chapters in Theatrical Afterlives engage in a similar choreography, this time through prison theatricals (in connection to Jane Austen), the Irish stage and colonial histories (in connection to the Brontës), late twentieth-century British experimental theatre (George Eliot), and the woman question and the New Woman of the mid to late nineteenth century (Ellen Wood, Mary Elizabeth Braddon). So, there is much more to discover!

Learn more about Theatrical Afterlives at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue