Catherine Haustein

Catherine Haustein is a trained chemist and novelist who brings scientific work, gender expectations, and political observation into romantic fiction. Natural Attraction follows Clementine, an aspiring naturalist in 1871 who uses a mysterious tonic to pass as a man named Calvin and join a prospecting expedition. The disguise opens a professional path while complicating her connection with Wesley, a preacher already promised to someone else. Penner Publishing issued the book in 2015 as a comic blend of expedition, science, and romance. Haustein is a professor emerita of chemistry, and her scientific career gives practical substance to Clementine's ambitions and to the novel's interest in discovery. The book uses its speculative device to test which ambitions and forms of attachment nineteenth-century roles permit, while keeping scientific curiosity central to Clementine's identity.