List of 1632 Characters (fictional) - Anne Jefferson

Anne Jefferson is a registered nurse, classmate of Sharon Nichols and native West Virginian who, like Nichols, was visiting Grantville for the occasion of her friend Rita Stearns' wedding. She was anticipating her own wedding just six weeks later, but her betrothed was left behind up-time. She first appears in the short story "A Matter of Consultation" where she and Nichols face off against Dr. William Harvey, the "discoverer" of the circulatory system. The two nurses "give him some pointers", including a humbling dressing down about medicine and the abilities of women and medicines. Concurrently, Anne Jefferson meets her future husband, historical diplomat and mathematician Adam Olearius who'd been acting as guide and translator for Harvey.

She is an important character in the widely varied negotiations set inside the Siege of Amsterdam, which begins with her taking center stage in the three Flint Gazette stories that were added to the print released versions: "Portraits", "Steps in the Dance", and "Postage Due". Her influential role continues within the siege in each of 1633, 1634: The Bavarian Crisis and 1634: The Baltic War. The related Gazette tales explain a typically Stearnsian bit of legerdemain — to improve communications in Europe by expediting a trans-European common postal system which will in the long run undermine the opposition. Even the canny Cardinal Richelieu fails to appreciate the danger of a freer flow of ideas and concepts across borders (which of course cannot be limited to just technology, but also include political ideas) to the established aristocratic hierarchy. Hence Jefferson's role becomes very important in Stearn's long range schemes to build democracy upon the graves of aristocratic institutions, putting Jefferson, like Gretchen Richter at the heart of the revolution in thought behind the sweeping neohistorical events related in the long fiction of the series.

By the conclusion of The Baltic War and The Bavarian Crisis, Anne was betrothed to Olearius and planning a life together in Amsterdam where Jefferson has established herself as a Doctor and built a family practice amidst the siege, whilst many of the city's established doctors had fled the city. With the help of the now firmly established Dutch Committees of Correspondence, this will help break the power of another guild—the guild system being another authoritarian institution deemed as repressive and opposed to modern freedoms and thought.