The woman on the cover of Gilded is Ethel Bethel, Catherine's great-grandmother's cousin, who passed away long before the author was born.
The festivities at the opening of the hat shop in Chapter 3 were inspired by Willy Wonka's grand entrance in the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, one of Catherine's favorite movies.
Yes, contraceptives, such as condoms, were indeed used in the 1800s (and much, much earlier). The Comstock Act of the era tried to ban the sale of birth control and prohibited information about it from being distributed through the mail, but word-of-mouth and helpful doctors continued to make it available.
Catherine first dreamed up the idea of a novel centering around an illicit hat shop back in high school. She originally planned to run an Alice in Wonderland theme throughout the book, which would include naming the protagonist Alice instead of Emma. The hatter remains, but the only Alice left in the book is Emma's technologically inept aunt discussed in Chapter 14.
One of Catherine's favorite research books was a reprint of the 1897 Sears, Roebuck Catalogue, which sold everything from the "Domestic Sunshine Range" to "The Princess Bust Developer and Food. Yes, Bust Food.
In Chapter 4, the judge's wife, Julia Franklin, is described as having "pupils
contracted like those of an opium addict." It wasn't uncommon for a refined Victorian woman to be addicted to a nerve-easing drug such as laudanum, which is indeed an opiate. Moreover, Gilded is set in the age of patent medicines, when Americans were bombarded with fraudulent cure-alls that mainly contained alcohol or narcotics.
Listen to an 1898 tune, "You Tell Me Your Dreams, I'll Tell You Mine."
Provided by Don Ferguson's Tin Pan Alley.
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