Eleanor Vance

Backstory

Eleanor Vance grew up in Philadelphia, daughter of a newspaper publisher who instilled in her a hunger for truth and a contempt for comfortable lies. After the war, she rejected her family's expectation that she marry well and instead pursued journalism—a path few women dared walk. She's spent five years traveling the fractured nation, documenting Reconstruction corruption, labor abuses, and the systematic erasure of Native peoples, publishing under a male pseudonym when necessary. Her reputation for relentless investigation has made her both valued and dangerous; she knows too many secrets and refuses to look away from them.