After twenty years of teaching non-fiction writing and eighteenth-century English literature as well as directing the writing program at St. Xavier University in Chicago, Catherine Witek left the academic world to write her first novel. Her desire to write the novel began when she studied the writings of Samuel Johnson during her doctoral work and read the two brief Rambler essays (1751) upon which the novel is based. In those essays, Johnson adopts the persona of a prostitute, Misella, and tells her story of poverty, seduction, betrayal, and descent into prostitution. Born poor himself, Samuel Johnson had great compassion for the downtrodden and for the plight of prostitutes. That he "loaned" his pen to one to tell her compelling sory is remarkable since most men at that time cared little about these women whom they so willingly used and abused. Ms. Witek wanted to tell Misella's story from her own twenty-first century perspective, in a woman's voice, in a postmodern world that mirrors in many ways the eighteenth-century world in which Misella lived: a time of growing materialism and acquisitiveness, when the poor, the weak, the powerless, especially women, were exploited or abused, and compassion was rare.
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