Merle Darling

Merle Darling has been living in the imaginary 19th century since the age of seven, when she first read "Little Women" and "The Secret Garden." She continues to cling to such habits as baking bread without a machine and hand-piecing quilts.

She makes her physical home in the same iconic American city that drew her ancestors during the actual 19th century, and enjoys imagining she's standing where they once stood.

She has never kept a diary and therefore, as Wilde would have it, has nothing sensational to read on the train. She does, however, find the rhythm of the subway condusive to working out the knottier bits of her stories.