“For decades, women had lived happily, easily, without a man. That was good enough for her.”

In an attempt to justify her rebuke of Claude, Sadie defers to the wisdom of Surviving Spinsterhood: The Joys of Living Alone, published in 1896. While the book is dated and offers some archaic advice, Sadie finds it empowering. It also suggests that even before Laura and her fellow suffragettes took to the streets, women were challenging patriarchy in whatever fashion they could. The book—despite the stigma attached to the word “spinster”—is a forward-looking treatise, one that Laura lives by (not alone but definitely without a man).

“But a first edition of one that had gone on to become an American classic meant more than that: It was a piece of history, the closest example of the author’s intent.”

When a first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass goes missing, Laura considers its value as an aesthetic artifact as well as the most direct connection to Whitman’s mind at the time of its composition. Fiona Davis, through her characters, makes this same argument, in various iterations, many times over the course of the novel. In fact, Sadie’s courtroom version of the argument persuades the judge to give Robin a longer sentence than he would have.

“A couple of the professors were wary of the women students in particular, commenting on their attire if their skirts were deemed too short, one even sneaking about the building in the hopes of catching them committing immoral acts with male students.”

Laura’s innocence regarding journalism school is challenged when she discovers that the halls of academia are just as sexist as the outside world. She sees sexism in the double standard of the professors, and sees it in her assignments.