When Linda Duval heard a voice floating out from inside a New England lighthouse, she was compelled to wander inside.

It wasn’t a ghostly apparition she heard at Mystic Seaport Museum, a living history museum in Mystic, Conn., but a documentary about the history of lighthouses on the East Coast. One detail in particular caught her attention.

“They said after the Civil War there were so many men killed that there was a shortage of men for the jobs they typically did,” said Duval, who was a Gazette features reporter for more than three decades. She retired in 2004 and embarked on a freelance writing career.

“Women started getting hired as bank tellers, clerks, secretaries and also lighthouse keepers,” she said. “What a fascinating life for a woman in that time period. It captured my imagination. I couldn’t let it go.”

She came home from her travels and settled in to write “The Lighthouse Keeper,” a historical women’s novel. The story, set in a fictional New England coastal town, revolves around heroine Amy Pritchard, a young, grieving Civil War widow who gets a job working in a lighthouse. When a violent storm hurtles through, her life is forever changed.

The book, published by the local Rhyolite Press, will be available during a book signing with Duval on Dec. 16 at Hooked on Books, as well as online at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.

“I’m 75 and finally have my dream job,” Duval said. “I’ve written thousands of stories. But this is where my heart is — writing a book. I’ve wanted to do that since I was 11 years old and read ‘Call of the Wild.’”

Duval incorporated the New

England scenery and history from her trip into the novel, including visits to the homes of Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, as well as the culture of the times and women seeking independence and the right to vote.

“There’s a romance element to the story,” Duval said, “but it’s more about her becoming a person of independence and strength and knowing what she wants from her own life.”

Plot twist: Duval might not be able to read her own novel.

The macular degeneration, a disease that affects a person’s central vision, she developed in her 40s prevents her from reading regular-sized print.

She’s legally blind in her left eye, has limited vision in her right eye, and needs largeprint books and a lot of light to read and write. But because of her vision, Rhyolite Press might make “The Lightkeeper” its first large-print book.

The new novel is, technically, Duval’s third book. Long before she co-wrote the 2016 nonfiction book “Insiders’ Guide to Colorado Springs,” there was her first novel, “Before Summer Ends,” written solely to earn money to buy her son a computer.

As part of the sweet romance genre, named for its hard line on no sex, swearing, drinking or drugs, Duval wrote the book in three weeks after working all day as a reporter. She sold it in the early ’90s under the pseudonym Linn Lavelle because she didn’t think it was appropriate for a working journalist to publish a romance novel. It’s still available online at Amazon.

“I spent my whole career writing and was satisfied with that, especially because it was such immediate gratification — to write it, get a byline, get stories out there and people react, whether good or bad,” she said. “To write a real novel was on my bucket list.”