We Answered Our Own Questions

We Answered Our Own Questions is a choral-voice historical fiction set across four weeks in London, 1693, the exact lifespan of The Ladies' Mercury, the world's first women's magazine. Told through a collective "we," the story follows a chorus of ordinary women, a widow who runs a chandler's shop, a seamstress not yet married, an apothecary's wife, a dyer's widow, each of whom wrote a letter to the Mercury that was never printed. When the publication folds after four issues with a quiet thank-you and no acknowledgment of the women it leaves behind, the chorus must reckon with what it means to be briefly seen and then made invisible again. Anchored in the quiet realism of tallow candles, penny coins, and household account books, this is a story about the archaeology of women's interior lives, the questions that had nowhere to go, and the private archives women built to hold them anyway.