Too Modern for 1740?

I’ve always worried about Louise, my main character in A FALSE DAWN. That readers would not accept her in a story set in the 1740s because Louis was too modern. Her concerns, about how to get some respect from the men in her life, seemed so contemporary, I worried, that she might seem out of place in a novel set 250 years ago.

I need not have worried! Reactions from readers, mostly women, have ranged from “Are you kidding, Jeff?” to “stop worrying.” Louise, they say, does NOT sound too modern for a historical novel, readers have told me. “Do you think women back then were not dealing with the same damned issues we all face today? Of course, they were,” one reader told me to my face.

And of course, the more research I do, as I write the sequel SUNRISING, the more I realize that women “back then” were indeed dealing squarely and loudly with these same issues; namely, how to get respect from men, how to have some control over your own life, how to obtain power and use it wisely for the benefit of everyone.

There are some things, clearly, that I should not worry about.