Janis Robinson Daly: Celebrating Women's Stories through Historical Fiction

In this episode of Armchair Historians, host Anne Marie Cannon interviews historical fiction author Janis Robinson Daly, whose work unearths the forgotten stories of early women doctors and the generations who paved the way for them.

Janis shares how genealogy research led her to discover that her great-great-grandfather was both an abolitionist lawyer and a founder of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania—sparking her fascination with women’s medical history. Her novels, The Unlocked Path and The Path Beneath Her Feet, follow fictional doctor Eliza Edwards, a character inspired by real women who fought for their place in medicine between the 1890s and World War II. 

Anne and Janis discuss balancing fact and fiction, the impact of the Depression and two world wars on women’s lives, and how major historical events shape character development. They also dive into Janis’s literary-citizenship project, #31TitlesWomenInHistory, a curated annual list celebrating women-centered historical fiction and amplifying voices of women authors.

Topics include:
– Early women physicians and the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania
– How genealogy research can uncover hidden stories
– Writing historical fiction responsibly
– The role of author’s notes in clarifying fact vs. imagination
– The Great Depression’s impact on women in medicine
– Janis’s #31TitlesWomenInHistory project and how she chooses the books
– Her upcoming 2026 novel

Books Mentioned:
– The Unlocked Path (2022)
– The Path Beneath Her Feet (2024)

Where to Find Janis:
janisrdaly.com | @janisrdaly_author

Related Armchair Historians Episodes:

• Wendy Rouse — Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Suffrage Movement
https://armchairhistorians.buzzsprout.com/1020073/episodes/10116683

• Dr. Tara Green — See Me Naked + Alice Dunbar-Nelson
https://armchairhistorians.buzzsprout.com/1020073/episodes/10100721

• A Haunted History of Invisible Women (Part 1) — Leanna Renee Hieber & Andrea Janes
https://armchairhistorians.buzzsprout.com/1020073/episodes/11438457

• A Haunted History of Invisible Women (Part 2) — Leanna Renee Hieber & Andrea Janes
https://armchairhistorians.buzzsprout.com/1020073/episodes/11475292

• Dr. Teri Finneman — 1872 Presidential Campaign of Victoria Woodhull (2021 Inauguration Special)
https://armchairhistorians.buzzsprout.com/1020073/episodes/7375942

• Joe McGill — The Slave Dwelling Project
https://armchairhistorians.buzzsprout.com/1020073/episodes/8870078

• Dr. Rod Tanchanco — First Patients
https://armchairhistorians.buzzsprout.com/1020073/episodes/5446376

Transcript

Janis Robinson, interview for Chatgpt - 12:2:25, 7.53 AM
===

​[00:00:00] 

​

Anne Marie: [00:01:00] Janice, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here today. Thank you, Anne-Marie. 

Janice: It's wonderful to be chatting with you this morning. 

Anne Marie: So we're just gonna get right off into the conversation. What's your favorite history? My favorite history is fairly recent. Actually, being an author of historical fiction, it's always a [00:02:00] little difficult to swallow, particularly for someone my age that 50 years in the past is now considered historical.

Janice: So my favorite era but's right up against that deadline, the first half of the 20th century. 1900 to 1950. There's just so much history, so many events, so many major global events that occurred then. So many advances in our society came forward during that time that I just find it. Absolutely fascinating.

Anne Marie: So 1900 to 1950 is really my favorite right now. So many things happened with technology and culture and the last 50 years up until now. There's a lot that has changed too. And that's like the theme of history, right? [00:03:00] Everything changes. Tell me why are you attracted to that history and how does that history speak to your work right now?

Anne Marie: Sure. So I think I got attracted to it the year when I lost my grandmother. The grandmother I knew the best. Had a long relationship with her until I was almost 30 years old, and I, she lived to be 92. Wow. She was born in the 1880s and I stopped and I thought, wow. What she has witnessed in her lifetime.

Anne Marie: Okay. She grew up in, Boston, where I'm also from, and she went to school by horse and carriage. Wow. She or trolley cars. Then she saw cars coming. Then she, was driving herself. I even inherited her 1968 Rambler with a stick shift on the wheel. You know that. And [00:04:00] then she married a man in 1919 who had just come back from serving in France from World War I.

Anne Marie: She saw her own son become a tail gunner in the Army Air Corps during World War ii. She saw her grandson, her oldest grandson, my brother being drafted for the Vietnam War, and I just thought, wow. What she's seen, what she's lived through, the depression, two World Wars, getting the right to vote as a woman in 1919 and just was really blown away by that amount of history that she lived through.

Anne Marie: And I regret, of course, after the fact that I didn't ask her more about that. Did she realize? What she had lived through and how did she appreciate it or not. So that really led me to wanting to set my [00:05:00] historical fiction novels during that timeframe as well. Maybe it was a little bit of a cop out because I had built in events.

Anne Marie: That I could anchor my story against and use those events to develop and drive my characters as well. I see that as history as your muse. It's your creative spark, and that's exactly what I do. Maybe you've had people say this, I don't know how you do that. Like how do you create historical fiction from history that's already there.

Anne Marie: But for me, and I'm thinking it's probably the same for you, is it speaks to you and that is so valid. Absolutely it does. It, it speaks to me when you think of what were the impacts of those events because those events do shape and drive our lives and how we live and how we approach, different [00:06:00] reactions in our lives and how do we cope and deal with them.

Anne Marie: Growing up or living through the Depression, created that depression generation. And that mentality of struggle and overcoming. My grandmother was widowed at the height of the depression, had two teenagers at home. Wow. How did she live through that? And one thing was she made all of my mother's clothes, not that my mother particularly liked and enjoyed wearing, handmade clothes to school and all living in the suburbs of Boston by then.

Anne Marie: But, you did what you had to do. Let's kinda move into your work right now and how that brought you into this idea of, women's hidden histories and hidden stories. So can you talk a little bit about that kind of transition from that love of the turn of the century up until the 1950s into women's history, I.

Anne Marie: Never set out to be an author. I [00:07:00] never had an inkling or an impulse to want to write. I enjoyed my English classes in high school and college, but never felt, that creative spark that you talked about or. To want to write and express myself through the written word. I was actually doing genealogy research, particularly researching my other grandmother's family, the grandmother that I didn't know, and finding her roots in Philadelphia and trying to put together the puzzle pieces of.

Anne Marie: How did she grow up in Philadelphia? In her grandfather's house. Her mother had been widowed and then she got to Boston and met my grandfather and got married and all. So I was really interested in that Philadelphia connection and that's where I made the discovery that her grandfather, my great-great-grandfather.

Anne Marie: A very forward thinking [00:08:00] man involved in the abolitionist movement. Oh. Talk about history. That I found was very cool. He was a lawyer and judge and actually defended runaway slaves in the 1850s. Wow. Okay. And won their freedom. Okay. Case that he was involved with in defending these runaway slaves.

Anne Marie: He won the cases and won the freedom for those men. So I am like all in on William Shannon Pierce. Me too. Who he was and me too. Yes. And I already was. Starting to think that, wow, there's a story here. And then I read another biographical entry about him in Famous Americans, and the very last line of the entry said he was a founder of the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania.

Anne Marie: Wow. What. They were women's medical colleges and [00:09:00] I just shifted my research and the history nerd in me came out and I went. Down the rabbit holes, trying to learn more about what was this women's medical college all about? And I discovered it was the first and longest running, women's only medical school, 120 year history.

Anne Marie: And then started to read about the students and the graduates. Of the school and what they had accomplished. Research discoveries forming an all women's hospital unit that traveled to France in World War I to serve and take care of injured civilians because the US Army didn't accept their offer of medical services.

Anne Marie: Wow. And then I'm just like blown away. I'm thinking, I love history. I [00:10:00] read a lot of historical fiction in my own pleasure reading. I have never heard about early women doctors. And that's when I made the decision, like their stories need to be told. These women need to be honored. They need to be celebrated.

Anne Marie: Women in medicine today need to understand how their paths were paved beforehand, and so I decided then I would write a book. I would write historical fiction that I think would get out to a broader audience than a nonfiction or biography book. And that's the impetus for the Unlocked path, which is set, not when the school opened in 1850, although I could have gone that route.

Anne Marie: But again, I was thinking of my grandparents' generation. And what they had lived through, and so I decided to set the book, opening it with [00:11:00] 1897 when a young woman enters the medical school, the age of 18, which you could do back then, you didn't need an undergraduate degree, and then took her into 1920.

Anne Marie: Then actually set her up for a sequel to come back at the height of the Depression in 1936 and bring her through to 1947 and the end of world War ii. Okay, so let's go back. What is the name of the first book in the series? So the first book is The Unlocked Path, and then the sequel is The Path Beneath Her Feet.

Anne Marie: In her later years, she has to take other paths in her life as her situation changes. Driven primarily by the Depression, which denied more women jobs because if there were any jobs out there during the Depression, they were going to [00:12:00] the men head of households. So actually the number and percentage of women.

Anne Marie: Doctors practicing during the depression dipped from a high of 5% to 4% of all doctors were women during the depression. So are both books out and available? Yes. The first one came out in 2022. The sequel, the Path Beneath Her Feet came out last year, September 24. Both are published by Black Rose Writing, which is an independent press out of Texas.

Anne Marie: And I've been super pleased with how well they have done the redo reactions, especially that have come through about people thanking me for telling, the stories of these women. Let's talk a little bit about Dr. Eliza Edwards. She is your protagonist. Correct. So Dr. [00:13:00] Eliza Edwards is a fictional character, but she is a composite.

Anne Marie: Of a lot of the research that I did in learning about the students and graduates of the Women's Medical College, so a lot of the letters and short biographical essays that I had read about many of those women. Formed her character, what drove her to want to study medicine, and then different episodes or scenes were crafted by a lot of the research I had done and read about to those women.

Anne Marie: So she, she is fictional, she's also very loosely based on my paternal grandmother, the one that came from Philadelphia who grew up in her. Grandfather's house surrounded also by maiden aunts. My grandmother had, she had about four or five maiden [00:14:00] aunts who I actually put into the original manuscript.

Anne Marie: How do you balance real history with historical fiction storytelling? Yeah, that's a great question, Anne-Marie, because it's hard, especially when the history nerd in us as historical fiction authors that takes hold and we get excited about all the research we've done and we think that, oh, that fact is really cool.

Anne Marie: But I, I learned quickly from a couple of different editors that I worked with. Yes, this is interesting. But what is the pure relevancy to your story? Does it add to your story? Does it move your story forward into another scene or another chapter, or you're just showing off all the research that you did?

Anne Marie: So it, it is a [00:15:00] very close. Balancing act to make sure that you were being authentic to the period, but not starting to write a textbook because you wanna keep your readers engaged, of course. And that's what historical fiction allows you to do, is to bring in, those imagined. Emotional responses of the characters to the historical events that they're living among.

Anne Marie: And what's the intrigue, what's, what are the challenges that they're facing? It's very tough. I always tell readers, and I spend a lot of time with my novels. Read the author's notes because that's where it's revealed. What is fact and what is fiction. I always tell people, absolutely read the author's notes.

Anne Marie: And my most recent book that I just finished coming up next March, I think my author's notes. I think my. Publisher was saying, this is gonna drive up your page count. You've got [00:16:00] so many pages at the back of the book here. I'm like, ah, I know, but it's important. And finally I said, okay I'll just close it off and tell people, just contact me if you have other questions about what's fact and fiction.

Anne Marie: You have a new book coming out? Yes. It's a two book series, right? Yes. And is there anything else about that series that you want us to talk about right now before we move into your new work? Both books are, great reads. I've even had several folks purchase copies to give us gifts to a woman physician.

Anne Marie: That they particularly admire. A little thank you gift. I've had many people purchase them that way, and I can do signed and inscribed copies. People wanna contact me directly to purchase books that way. Great detail. I love that. That is a good idea. Now I'm thinking about my doctor that I just had to leave because I moved to a [00:17:00] different part of the state and I just loved her.

Anne Marie: Yep. Oh, there you go. You might have made a sale, sister. Okay. Just email me. I take Venmo credit card, Zelle. You go girl. Hashtag 31 Titles, women in History Project. Yes. So let's talk about that now and then we'll move into final conversations about your new work that's gonna be coming out. Okay.

Anne Marie: When did you say it's coming out? March, 2026. So you do have this project and I was looking at some of the titles in the project so far. It's called hashtag 31, titles, women in History. Sure. When my first book came out I thought back of, why was I writing this book? And yes, I wanted to sell copies.

Anne Marie: I wanted to make a little bit of money, make back a little bit of money, yeah. That I had put into creating my product. And that's how I view publishing. You're [00:18:00] creating a product. And like any product, there are startup costs. There are production costs. To make that product. The real reason I wanted to write the book was just to celebrate these women in history whose stories hadn't been told There were.

Anne Marie: A lot of those types of books being written in the past, 20 years or so that other authors were finding those stories of those women buried in, the histories pages and telling their stories. And so wouldn't it be cool to have a list of them? Share with other readers who wanna be inspired and educated about women in history who aren't in our textbooks and come together in a program.

Anne Marie: I refer to it as a, an example of literary citizenship. Of authors supporting [00:19:00] other authors because we're not in a competition. We're out here to celebrate and showcase these women's stories. And so by putting together a list of 31 titles of women in historical fiction. That we can read about meant.

Anne Marie: I was also then engaging and working with 30 other authors who had books that would be appearing on the list. It became a a little bit of a passion project. Started in 2023 with my first list of 31. Now, of course, my book was on there because I do talk about the Women's Medical College, and I do have secondary characters in the book who were.

Anne Marie: Based on real women and their accomplishments are highlighted in the book. But then I was also able to, I'm taking a quick look at the 23 list. Who had [00:20:00] ever known about Caroline Faraday? Philanthropist from Connecticut and New York who helped save and rehabilitate of women, survivors of Ravens book, lilac Girls, written by Martha Hall, Kelly or whoever knew the story of Victoria Woodhull.

Anne Marie: The first female presidential candidate in the 1870s? I do because we do have an episode about that. I'm gonna do a little plug here. Wonder. Great. Excellent. So Madam President by Nicola Evelina. Absolutely. I will put that in the show notes. Yes. Who knew about Bell DeCosta Green, the personal librarian to JP Morgan.

Anne Marie: Who was a black woman passing as white, written by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray. So just amazing books and [00:21:00] I was able to come back in 2024. With another list of another 30 books with more women that we were learning about, we were learning more about Francis Perkins, the first woman to hold a cabinet position in becoming Madame Secretary by Stephanie Dre last year.

Anne Marie: Came out again with another list and we are able to learn more about writer and editor Jesse Redmond Faucet. Harlem Rhapsody by Victoria, Christopher Murray, just so many amazing stories. Claire Eiffel, who was the daughter of Gustav Eiffel, the architect and engineer of the Eiffel Tower, and who knew that his daughter, Claire, was instrumental in his business in getting the Eiffel Tower built.

Anne Marie: So I'm working right now on my 2026 list. Which will be the fourth year of the program and [00:22:00] excited to dive into more stories in identifying more women that need to have their stories brought forward from the shadows of history. So where do you find these books? Research. I keep my ears open. I subscribe to Historical Novels Review, which does a roundup of upcoming books in the historical fiction genre.

Anne Marie: I get suggestions from other readers who are plugged in to the genre as well. I ask. Authors that were on my list in prior years. Are you working on anything? Do you have any publishing sisters that you know of that are coming out with a book that would be meeting my criteria and it might be.

Anne Marie: Helpful to just take a quick moment to mention my criteria because it's hard to actually cu down and only include 31 books. So again, it is historical fiction, so no [00:23:00] biographies or memoirs because I do think the fiction angle makes books reach a larger readership and audience. Of course, I want the author to be a woman.

Anne Marie: I want diversity, and diversity comes in many different forms, and so it's the subject matter herself, cultural identity as well as the subject or area where she reached a claim. The cultural identity of the authors themselves and even type of publisher. So it's not just all the typical mainstream, traditionally published Big five.

Anne Marie: Books, but there's a lot of indie presses. There's some self-published books that are also included because they're still wonderful books and and they need the help in getting the the awareness build that this program creates. And then finally I do look at Good Reads ratings to make sure it is a well written [00:24:00] book, that my readers are going to enjoy the writing of the story, not just the story itself.

Anne Marie: Okay. I have a book for you to consider. Okay. It might not meet your criteria, but for some reason, as I was planning for this interview, I kept thinking about this book, and it was one of the first historical fiction books I ever read. So it was published quite a while ago, but it's called The Red Tent. Oh yes.

Anne Marie: That was on my very first list. Oh it was? Yes. Yay. 'cause it was one of my favorites. I loved it. Was one my favorite book. I love that book. Yes. It just spoke to me on so many different levels and for me it was this, the thing that I loved most about it was this through kind of theme story about the change from paganism to monotheism.[00:25:00] 

Anne Marie: Yeah, and I really, or was it on my list? Now I'm looking. It was one of my favorite books ever. I use it as a reference point all the time. Oh. Maybe you'll need to reconsider it. It was the Red 10. I'll put it on this year, 1997 by Nita Diante. I'm just gonna read this so that listeners can pick up the book if they're interested.

Anne Marie: It's a historical novel that retells the biblical story of Dyna. Daughter of Jacob and Leah from Genesis. Yeah, from Dina's own point of view. And it is just, so that is one of the most brilliant historical fiction books still to this day that I've ever read. Absolutely. There's just so many amazing things about it.

Anne Marie: And I'm not a religious person, but I loved the way that she brought that story to life. So yeah, that's my 2 cents. Is there anything else you wanna [00:26:00] say about hashtag 31 titles? Can I just put in one other plug? Absolutely. So I encourage everyone to starting March 1st search the hashtag on social media, hashtag 31 3 1 num numerals titles, women in history.

Anne Marie: And what you'll find then is. All, or hopefully all the other authors promoting the list. And again, supporting each other's titles, not just their own. So each day of the month is a different title that we're showcasing and spotlight. And I'll have that order. Put together in a calendar, visual and everything.

Anne Marie: And then at the end of the month, we do a nice wrap up and I have a survey that folks can take. And again, you'll be able to follow me on social media or subscribe to my newsletter and get the link to the [00:27:00] survey. And in the survey I ask, which books have you already read on the list? Which books are you now adding?

Anne Marie: To your TB red list, and you can enter to win a copy of those books because the authors offer up free copies as prizes for taking the survey. Ooh, fun. Do you have audio books of your novels available to people? Yes, my novels are available wherever books are sold. You can ask your local bookstore to order them for you.

Anne Marie: And then on Amazon, they are available as a Kindle ebook. Also Kindle Unlimited, if you have a KU subscription. My books are available there and Audible. Janice, thank you so much for being here. I really enjoyed our conversation. Oh, thank you, Anne-Marie. This has been [00:28:00] great. 

​[00:29:00]