The Women Who Got Left Out

A few weeks ago I stood in a library in my hometown and said something out loud that I have been thinking about ever since.

I talked about the histories that don’t make it into the official record. The stories underneath the stories. The things that got left out, or buried, or quietly reclassified as myth. I talked about teachers who were willing to go further than the curriculum required…who told me things in classrooms that I carried for decades before I understood why they mattered.

What I didn’t say, because the talk wasn’t the place for it, was how deep that thread actually goes.

I want to go there now.

The women who got left out

History has a pattern. It is not a subtle one.

There are threads in history that are easy to miss if you’re not looking for them. Women who carried ancient knowledge - who healed, who prophesied, who held wisdom in their hands, and passed it quietly from one generation to the next - have a way of fading from the official record over time. Not erased dramatically. Gradually. A reframing here. A story simplified there. A figure reduced from complex and luminous to something more manageable.

We inherit the simplified version and rarely think to ask what came before it.

I have been asking that question for most of my adult life. Somewhere along the way, the asking found its way into the books.

Sophia

In the Gnostic tradition, Sophia is not a name. She is a principle. The divine feminine wisdom at the heart of creation; present before the world was formed, woven into the fabric of everything, and systematically written out of the version of the story that survived.

My present-day protagonist is named Sophia. That was not an accident.

I wanted to write a woman who carries something ancient in her without knowing it. Who has been seeing things she can’t explain since childhood. Who has always sensed that the world is larger and stranger and more connected than what she was taught. …and who is slowly, imperfectly, finding her way back to what she already knows.

The name is a quiet nod to something much older than the character. A thread I was pulling before I fully understood where it led.

What keeps finding me

Here is the part I find most interesting, and most honest.

Some of what I have woven into these books was deliberate. Sophia’s name. The 16th century English setting of Book 1, with its particular relationship to religious upheaval and the suppression of older spiritual practices. The explicit reference to the Divine Sophia in the first book’s past timeline.

Some of it arrived without my full awareness and revealed itself only after.

In The Enigma, there is a figure called the Cailleach - an ancient feminine archetype from Celtic tradition, a keeper of wisdom, a woman who appears at the threshold between worlds and shows the way. I named her Mary.

I named her Mary before I understood why. Then I looked up and saw what I had done, another nod to the divine feminine hidden in plain sight. Another woman with ancient knowledge and grace, quietly present in the margins of the story, helping without being credited.

I don’t think that was an accident either. I think the series knows things before I do.

The thread

There is a pattern in the women who got left out of history that mirrors the pattern in the women I write about. They knew things. They were connected to something older than the institutions that eventually displace them. That knowing came with a weight. The series doesn’t look away from that.

The knowledge survived anyway, passed forward through the women who came after, even when the names and the explicit teaching were lost.

That is what this series is about underneath everything else. Not just the past lives, or dual timelines, or the mystery of connection across centuries. It’s about the recovery of something that was never supposed to be forgotten in the first place.

The women who got left out are still here. In the stories. In the names. In the quiet knowing of the reader who picks up these books and feels, on some level she can’t quite articulate, that she already knew this.

She did. She just needed someone to say it out loud.