| As I read through several years of The Busy Body columns, I thought what fun it would be to write a story about a woman who wrote such a column. I loved the column name and decided to steal it outright, though giving it the more modern single-word usage: Busybody. In discussing the idea with a friend, he suggested I make the Busybody a man, and Simon Westover was born.
As I began to research the story, imagine my surprise to discover that the "Society of Ladies" who published The Lady's Monthly Museum (as indicated on the title page on the left) was really a group of men. Both The Old Woman and The Busy Body were most likely men. It soon became clear that the intent of the men editing the magazine was to encourage a very traditional, submissive role for women, to combat the recent interest in "women's rights" led by Mary Wollstonecraft and others. So I decided my fictional magazine, The Ladies' Fashionable Cabinet, would be exactly the opposite, written by a group of republican women and men who set out to counteract the insidious messages buried in the essays and stories in The Lady's Monthly Museum. And since my fictional dispenser of advice, The Busybody, required a bit of a romantic nature, I decided to make Simon Westover a true Romantic whose political idealism spilled over into matters of the heart. What better antagonist for him than a woman who does not believe in romance?
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