Victoria Cosner Love has spent the better part of thirty years poking around graveyards and digging for lost pieces of history. She is especially fond of delving into missing pieces of women’s history. She coauthored a book, Women Under the Third Reich (Greenwood Publishing), and now has turned her attention to the infamous Madame Lalaurie and her incredible family. A longtime member of the Association for Gravestone Studies, she has worked in public history facilities for more than twenty years and has her master’s degree in American studies, specializing in cultural landscapes of garden cemeteries.
Victoria Cosner Love (right) and Lorelei Shannon at the House of Blues in New Orleans.
Lorelei Shannon has spent the better part of thirty years following Victoria Cosner Love around graveyards for her own inscrutable purposes. Lorelei and Victoria met at the tender age of fourteen. From the very start they shared a love of history—particularly the obscure and unusual variety. While Victoria went on to become a respected historian, Lorelei became a novelist. She never lost her love of history, and she frequently incorporates historical elements in her southern gothic fiction. This is her first book-length work of nonfiction and her first collaboration with Victoria. She hopes it will be the first of many.