By S. Lucia Kanter St. Amour
The Covert Buccanner by S. Lucia Kanter St. Amour is due for release on 13th October and is available for pre-order now online and in all good bookshops: https://mybook.to/CovertBuccaneer
I didn’t write my first historical novel in my twenties, plucking an agent’s name from my rolodex and calling with a half-baked manuscript and a life unlived. I wrote it in my fifties, in between Zoom negotiations across three time zones, law school clinics, special needs motherhood, and advocacy work. Not because I finally found the time, but because the time finally found me.
We hear about “late bloomers” or reinvention as if midlife were a crisis to recover from. But for me, this isn’t a reinvention—it’s a revelation. The Covert Buccaneer, my dual-timeline historical fiction debut, didn’t emerge from nowhere. It’s the culmination of decades of fighting for truth in courtrooms, classrooms, and closed-door negotiations. It’s the byproduct of listening—really listening—to women’s stories: the erased, the overlooked, the barely whispered. And it’s a reckoning with the silences we’ve inherited.
The Power of Arriving Late (and Loud)
Publishing a novel at this stage of life doesn’t feel like a detour; it feels like a culmination. A convergence of lived experience, legal insight from real life stories I couldn’t have conjured, and a relentless curiosity about the stories we’re not told. There’s a precision to writing in your fifties. No more angling for permission or softening the edges, hoping they’ll like it. You say what needs to be said, and you say it well.
My protagonist, Ellie Benvenuto, is a modern-day climate migrant attorney and special needs caregiver navigating injustice in San Francisco. Her great-great-grandmother, Teddy Ellis, is a cross-dressing suffragist miner in the 1800s American West. They’re separated by a century but united by grit, defiance, and the slow-burn refusal to be silenced. I know these women intimately because I’ve been fighting beside them all my life.
Writing the Women Back In: Rage, Resilience, and Really Good Research
It’s now axiomatic that history is often his-story. A limited lens, indeed. Women are footnotes or cautionary tales, if they appear at all. The Covert Buccaneer was inspired by a real family manuscript that, despite its detailed accounts of gold rush adventures, erased the women in the rooms, on the frontier, and staking the claims where it all happened. That omission (one I don’t think I would have notice in my twenties, mind you) fanned the fire already crackling in me.
So I dug into more research with a pathological attention to detail. I revitalized the silenced. I gave voice to the daughters, wives, the immigrants, and “helpers” whose stories were left in the margins (at best). And I didn’t stop with the past. I wrote a present-day character who embodies the legal, social, economic, and emotional inequities women still face—especially mothers and caregivers. Fiction gave me the freedom to trumpet the truth and complete the story.
A unique electricity powers this book, fueled by both fury and fascination. Beneath the historical facts was a pulse of righteous anger: at how women’s stories are still sidelined, their work still undervalued, their truths still questioned.
But here’s the thing: Rage doesn’t cancel out joy. This book is also laced with tenderness, wit, and the quiet pleasures of discovery. Writing it was an act of resistance and love.
Midlife, Myth-Busting & Modern Buccaneers
Women in midlife are often dismissed, devalued, or rendered invisible. After all, our sexual prime has passed and our reproductive value expired. But let me tell you: we are dangerous in the best way. We’ve outgrown the need to please. We’ve sharpened our tools. We know how to build, disassemble, and rebuild again. That’s not decline. It’s power.
The “buccaneer” in my title isn’t just a nod to a historical plotline. It’s a metaphor. A covert buccaneer is any woman who reclaims stolen space: in history, in work, in her own damn life. That’s who I wrote this for. That’s who I am.
What I Want Readers to Know
I want women—especially those over 50—to know that your voice and your value don’t expire. If anything, they becomes more potent with time. You become unleashed and free from the decades of quiet observation you’ve done in the world (remember: invisibility is also a superpower, and you’ve just been lying in wait). You don’t have to write a novel to reclaim your power. You just have to tell the truth (and keep listening!). Confidently, unapologetically, and with all the nuance life has taught you.
And I’ll be right here: dropping truth-bombs and writing the stories they forgot to include (and doing it on my own terms). No more waiting for permission.
Follow S. Lucia Kanter Saint Amour here: https://www.instagram.com/santaluciasf/