Murray State University alumna releases new book

 

American Magdalene: The Life Behind the Scandalous Book Madeleine: An Autobiography explores the story of women’s labor, survival, sex work, agency, censorship recovery and salvation, gender, power, trauma and resilience

 

MURRAY, Ky. – Dr. Brenda Tolian, alumna of the Doctor of Arts in English pedagogy program at Murray State (‘24), released a book titled American Magdalene: The Life Behind the Scandalous Book Madeleine: An Autobiography (McFarland, 2025) on Nov. 20, 2025.

Tolian is a teacher in New Orleans, Louisiana, and a writer of Gothic fiction and poetry.

The book began as an online graduate assignment for her doctorate in English pedagogy.

“Dr. Kevin Binfield directed his students to search for books that had slipped out of sight, the ones forgotten by the public but still pulsing with life, just waiting to be discovered in the archives,” said Tolian. “He pushed us to dig and follow leads wherever they drifted, and we celebrated even the smallest discoveries together.”

That’s how she discovered Madeleine: An Autobiography, an anonymous book written in 1919. At first, it was only an assignment, said Tolian, nothing more. But once she began reading and tracing the research, she saw the extraordinary life of a woman who survived as best she could in a world rarely kind to working-class women.

“I realized how many voices never make it into the canon, not because they lacked talent, but because they were overlooked, dismissed, silenced, or, in Madeleine’s case, their words banned and burned,” said Tolian. “Her story, the mystery and intrigue of her life and the life of her book, is fascinating, touching on topics of women’s labor, survival, sex work, agency, censorship, recovery and salvation, gender, power, trauma and resilience.”

Tolian said it was attribution studies and textual bibliography that uncovered the story of this remarkable woman.

“My doctoral work at Murray State University showed me how texts come into being, how they are shaped by editors, markets and cultural forces, and how those forces determine which voices endure and which disappear,” Tolian said. “That work reshaped not only my scholarship but my pedagogy as an educator. Understanding the life of a text teaches students to read with greater precision and curiosity, to see the human choices behind what survives and what we, as a society, turn our backs on. It trains us, as teachers, to ask more complex questions, to help students evaluate sources, and to notice whose voices are missing from the conversation. It also leads us to question what we read and are told in a world that leans into the simulacra of Artificial Intelligence.”

Tolian said these skills, along with the detailed pedagogy of all of her classes taken for her DA program, are essential in modern English classrooms, where learning to read critically is inseparable from learning to think critically.

This isn’t Tolian’s first published work, however.

“During my years at Murray, I taught full-time and wrote almost as much,” Tolian said. “Some of the poetry I created for a class with Dr. (Carrie) Jerrell was published in Folk Riot: A Southern Magazine this past summer. My first poetry collection, Bestial Mouths (Raw Dog Screaming Press), earned a nomination for the Elgin Award. This was preceded by Blood Mountain (Raw Dog Screaming Press), my composite novel, which explored storytelling through landscape, darkness, and ecology.”

Tolian said taking on the roles of graduate student, teacher and writer taught her hard lessons in discipline and reminded her that the stories individuals inherit and choose to tell shape them in unexpected ways. 

“I didn’t do this alone; I had great fellowship with my instructors and my cohort, and I even took classes with my daughter, who also earned her English master’s degree at Murray State,” said Tolian.

American Magdalene: The Life Behind the Scandalous Book Madeleine: An Autobiography is available for purchase here: mcfarlandbooks.com/product/american-magdalene/