Jeanette Watts

This is the home page of Jeanette Watts, seamstress, actress, dancer, writer, instructor, and very poor housekeeper. Just keep following the menus on the left until you get the Jeanette you’re looking for.

Print

Historical Novel Society

Thanks to the Historical Novel Society for their great review:

Gilded Age Pittsburgh is the setting for Jeanette Watts’s lavishly atmospheric debut novel Wealth & Privilege, which turns on the schemes and counter-schemes various family members and interested strangers have in getting comfortably-situated and affable young Thomas Baldwin married off.

One such scheme results in his being married to a woman he quickly comes to detest, while another inadvertently brings him into close contact with a woman  he quickly comes to love, despite the fact that she seems permanently beyond his reach.

Watts does a superbly smooth and confident job of keeping her plot-lines flowing along at an enticing clip, and although her period research is obviously extensive, she incorporates it so adeptly that the novel’s large amounts of exposition – on contemporary events like the assassination of President Garfield, or the Johnstown Flood – always feel like organic parts of the story.

The result is an involving and subtly funny work worth reading.