Stella: Unrepentant Madam

Ann Turner is the financial and budget manager of the University of
British Columbia Library.

Among the primary and unpublished sources listed by historical
researcher Linda Eversole for this biography are the charge books and
mugshot books of the Victoria, British Columbia, police. Her subject,
Stella Carroll, was an astute businesswoman and a successful
entrepreneur when business was a man’s world. She was also
Victoria’s most notorious madam. Her life story reads like a novel,
thanks to Eversole’s skills as a raconteur, but behind the scenes (and
documented in the endnotes and sources) are 20 years of meticulous
research in the United States and Canada.

Though Stella was wealthy and well-known from San Francisco northward
during her time in Victoria, her early and final years were spent in
poverty in the United States. Elusive family records, reminiscences, and
correspondence were the sources for these periods of her life. In her
determination to ferret out the whole of Stella’s story and to
represent her as faithfully as possible, good and bad, Eversole has
given us a graphic description of day-to-day life in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries for both the rich and the poor.