Elia Wilkinson Peattie

Elia Wilkinson Peattie became a reporter at the Chicago Tribune in the 1880s, when women were not, and then ran the Chicago Tribune's literary page for a decade — the most powerful book critic in the Midwest. She wrote ghost stories, suffrage novels and essays, buried three of her children, and kept working; Painted Windows gathers six meditations on night, solitude, friendship, fame, remorse and travel.