Fame and Obscurity

When I stumbled across one of the two main characters in the novel I’m currently working on–Betsy Patterson Bonaparte–at an exhibit of Gilbert Stuart portraits some years back, I was intrigued. Here was a clearly fascinating historical character languishing in obscurity.



Yes, her beauty and her marriage to Napoleon’s youngest brother in 1803 had catapulted her to celebrity status in the 19th century–a collection of her letters published shortly after her death in 1879 referred to her as "one of the most famous women in America," a statement that was to me a sadly ironic comment on the fleeting nature of fame. Sure, she was the subject of numerous biographies and historical novels into the early 20th century, and during the same era there were two silent films and a Broadway play based on her life. But who really remembered her now?


Well, apparently, a lot of people–at least in the environs of her native Baltimore. The other day I was at the Maryland Historical Society’s library in that city, putting in a request for a box of her correspondence. A man standing next to me, who turned out to be a Historical Society staff member, asked me what I was researching. When I told him, he informed me that he himself had done a lot of research on Betsy, and that if there was anything I needed to know I should just ask him.


Okay, maybe that’s not so surprising–after all, the MdHS is where Betsy’s papers are housed, along with various personal items. They’re even having something of a Betsy Bonaparte festival in the fall of 2010. But a little later, I was giving a luncheon talk at a club in Baltimore called the Hamilton Club (among those present were several people from my Baltimore childhood and adolescence, including my high school English teacher, who must now be approaching 90). The talk was primarily about my first novel, A More Obedient Wife, but when I mentioned my work-in-progress, I was surprised to find that virtually everyone in the room seemed to know all about Betsy.


"I must be the only person who grew up in Baltimore who’d never heard of Betsy Patterson," I remarked. (Baltimoreans, true to their conservative nature, seem to prefer to call her by her maiden name). I’ve even discovered that a bakery in downtown Baltimore I liked to frequent when I was a child was called "Betsy Patterson’s." Somehow, I’d never noticed the name.


Well, all right–maybe everyone in Baltimore has heard of her. But what about the rest of the country? I now live in Washington, D.C., a city that has a lot of its own history to deal with; Betsy made a number of appearances here in the early 19th century (including a very high-profile one when she appeared at a party wearing an apparently see-through dress), but in relative terms she must still be pretty obscure. Or so I thought.


Yesterday I toured an old plantation house called Riversdale located in what is now a Washington suburb. It belonged to a remarkable woman named Rosalie Stier Calvert, who left behind a lot of letters (published in a book called Mistress of Riversdale). In several of these letters she mentions Betsy, and I’m about to write a scene that places Betsy on a visit there. So I thought it would be a good idea to take a look at the place.


It’s a beautiful house, lovingly restored, and I had an extremely knowledgeable and personable gentleman as my docent for what turned out to be a private tour (at only $3 per adult admission, this place is a bargain – I urge those living in or visiting the DC area to check it out). I kept hinting that I was primarily interested in what the house would have looked like in 1803 or 1804, without mentioning exactly why. But then I started to explain that I was working on a historical novel.


"Betsy!" muttered my docent, somewhat wearily.


How did he know? Does he routinely get visitors working on historical novels about Betsy Bonaparte? How many of us are out there? I was too taken aback to ask.


Of course, it’s possible that writing about someone who’s reasonably well known could actually be an advantage; maybe more people will be willing to buy and read a book about someone who’s not that obscure. But for me, part of the appeal of writing historical novels is precisely to rescue my (real) characters from obscurity, to make a "discovery." Clearly, Betsy has already been discovered.


But I can console myself with the thought that I have another character up my sleeve, one that only a very few people know about–even in Baltimore, which was also her hometown. Her name was Eliza Anderson Godefroy. And if you’re interested in knowing more about her (as well as in finding out some things about Betsy that may not be so well known), you’ll need to read my next book. Of course, first I’ll need to write it!

My Dinner With Woody

The novel I’m currently working on has led me to contemplate the phenomenon of celebrity: one of my characters, Betsy Bonaparte, was catapulted into the public eye after her marriage to Napoleon’s youngest brother in 1803. In a way, she was the Paris Hilton of the early 19th century: young, beautiful, fabulously wealthy, and famous for being famous. (She also had a formidable intellect, but that’s not what she was famous for.) Complete strangers felt free to speculate about her private life, and even to write raunchy poetry about her when she appeared in public in a scandalously flimsy dress–sort of a 19th-century version of the Paris Hilton pornographic video episode, if anyone remembers that at this point.

The other evening I had a brush with celebrity myself. Not with Paris Hilton, but with someone who’s figured far larger in my own psyche. On the way to a benefit performance and dinner at the Metropolitan Opera, my hostess–a relative of mine–casually mentioned that I would be seated next to Woody Allen at dinner. My husband would be next to his wife Soon Yi.

WHAT?? For the next five and a half hours–through the cocktail reception and the four and a half hour performance–I suffered low-level panic. What could I possibly say to him? How could I keep him entertained? I knew he was famously reclusive, and I had the feeling he wasn’t the type to suffer fools gladly.

What is it about the prospect of encountering a celebrity that frazzles us so (or me, at least)? Part of it, I think, is the disconcerting feeling of seeing someone who looks so familiar but whom you’ve never actually met in the flesh before. During the performance, seated right behind Woody and Soon Yi, I kept thinking that they looked exactly like themselves (although Woody’s hair is grayer than I remembered). It was eerie, like seeing a painting come to life.

The other thing is what I might call the knowledge imbalance: when you meet a celebrity like Woody Allen, he knows nothing about you, but you already know a lot about him. Or I did, anyway. I asked my 18-year-old daughter if she knew anything about Woody and Soon Yi, and she had no idea. But I remember vividly the shock of finding out about their relationship, back in 1992: how Woody’s companion of 12 years, Mia Farrow, had discovered nude pictures of her 22-year-old adopted daughter, Soon Yi, in Woody’s apartment; how he subsequently admitted to an affair; how, during the bitter custody battle that followed, Mia accused Woody of molesting their 7-year-old adopted daughter. The week the Soon Yi story broke was the one and only time I’ve actually purchased a copy of People magazine.

So I don’t usually follow these sorts of celebrity scandals–not closely, anyway (I’ll admit that I do on occasion leaf through People magazine in the supermarket checkout line). But this was personal. I grew up on Woody Allen. I felt like I knew him, maybe because he bears a resemblance to my Uncle Morris–and because his New York Jewish sensibility struck a chord. I haven’t loved all of his movies–some I’ve downright disliked–but there are concepts in life that I find I can only express through the prism of a Woody Allen movie ("Zelig-like," is one adjective that comes to mind, along with the joke from Annie Hall about the guy whose brother thought he was a chicken–"We’d turn him in," says the guy, "but we need the eggs"). I had a certain image of him, and it didn’t correspond with the reality of a 56-year-old man having an affair with a girl who was in effect, if not in the eyes of the law, his own stepdaughter.

This was obviously one topic I wasn’t going to bring up at dinner (when my husband asked what he should talk to Soon Yi about, I told him, "Just don’t ask her how they met"). But what made the knowledge imbalance even worse was that whether I brought it up or not, Woody would know that I knew. That awkwardness would hang in the air, as it always must when Woody Allen meets someone new (unless that someone was, like my daughter, still a baby when the scandal broke). It was implicit in the moment of introduction, when I said my name, and Woody said, unnecessarily, "Woody."

After we were installed at our table, I was relieved when the woman sitting on the other side of Woody proceeded to engage him in a lengthy conversation. But eventually it was my turn. Actually, finding something to talk about was somewhat easier than I’d imagined. I asked him a few questions about his work, but he also talked about how much he’d liked Washington (where I live) when he came here to do standup in the sixties, and how he can’t go to the opera because he can’t stay up that late.

He was pleasant enough, but I had the distinct impression that he would have preferred to be elsewhere–probably in bed, asleep. Unlike some of the other celebrities in attendance, who had posed on the red carpet in their Yves St. Laurent outfits (the company was a sponsor of the event), Woody was there to see the opera–he’s a genuine fan. The other stuff–the paparazzi, the dinner conversation–was just something he had to put up with. He didn’t ask me anything about myself, but then, I didn’t expect him to. That’s part of the celebrity imbalance: I knew all about him (or thought I did), but he didn’t know anything about me, and didn’t particularly want to. My role, as I saw it, was to make his experience as painless as possible.

That weird false familiarity that surrounds a celebrity–the feeling that you already know this person even though you’ve never met–is heightened in Woody’s case because his off-screen persona is so similar to his on-screen one. At times I had the surreal feeling that Woody had either just stepped out of one of his movies, or I had just stepped into one (kind of like Mia Farrow’s character in The Purple Rose of Cairo, to use another Woody Allen metaphor). When our main course arrived–retro-comfort-food meat loaf with a hard-boiled egg in the middle–Woody stared at it glumly and then never touched it. A bit later the chair of the event took the podium and mentioned that she had chosen the menu to cut costs, in recognition of the economic crisis (never mind that it was described in the program as "Kobe Beef Meat Loaf"). Woody murmured, "So she’s the one I should complain to." He could have been Alvy Singer, or Virgil Starkwell, or any of his other on-screen alter egos.

Throughout the conversation, I had a sort of double vision of him: he was–perhaps surprisingly–just an ordinary human being, doing ordinary things; but he was also a celebrity, someone whose life I knew way more about than I should have. When he mentioned that one reason he needed to get to bed early was that he took his daughters to school in the morning, I thought: how sweet, how normal. But at the same time I couldn’t help wondering if he’d ever done that for the three kids he’d had with Mia–one biological, two adopted. I doubted it. Hadn’t he refused to marry Mia, hadn’t he even maintained a separate apartment throughout their relationship? How did those three kids feel now about his apparently idyllic relationship with their sister, and the two little girls who were at the same time their half-sisters and their nieces?

But if you just looked at the two of them, Woody and Soon Yi, the way you’d look at any couple you’d just met, there seemed to be nothing odd about their relationship, apart from the 35-year age difference. When Woody decided it was time to go, I saw him give Soon Yi the same gesture–raised eyebrows, lowered chin–that my own husband has given me, for the same reason, on countless occasions. They seemed affectionate, companionable, happy. Who am I to judge them? Who am I to think I know all about them?

Some would say that celebrities have no right to complain about intrusions into their privacy. They’ve invited attention, the argument goes, and they have to take the bitter with the sweet. Certainly that’s true in some cases. Betsy Bonaparte, for example, could easily have worn more clothing and attracted less attention, and she chose not to. But in other situations it’s not so clear. Don’t celebrities have the right to fall in love–and act upon that feeling–without undergoing intense scrutiny, even when they violate society’s conventions? When Betsy’s marriage fell apart very publicly, did she deserve the scorn that some heaped upon her? Did Woody and Soon Yi?

But I guess it’s naive to expect that the public will ignore such goings on. After all, I didn’t exactly ignore the Soon Yi episode myself, and I’m writing a whole book about Betsy (although in my opinion the fact that she’s been dead for over 100 years absolves me of any responsibility to respect her privacy or refrain from judging her). Not to mention the fact that I’m writing this blog post now.

I guess the bottom line is that, while I continue to see Woody and Soon Yi as celebrities–and while I’m not about to forgot everything I’ve read about them–having had an actual brief encounter with them, I also can’t help but see them as human beings. Maybe it’s the fact that Soon Yi laughed at one of my jokes, or that Woody seemed genuinely interested in some of what I had to say; maybe I’m just flattered that they deigned to pay any attention to me at all. And maybe I’m impressed that, after enduring abuse that would send most people permanently underground, they’ve simply gotten on with their lives. I may never understand what happened between them, but I’m no longer feeling equipped to condemn it. Really, it’s none of my business.

[N.B. -- Woody mentioned during dinner that the producers of the movie My Dinner With Andre originally wanted him to play the role ultimately played by Wallace Shawn--but he declined because he didn't think he could memorize all those lines. Hence the title of this post.]

Plus Ca Change...

"People don't write letters any more!" When I go around speaking about my novel, A More Obedient Wife -- which is based on letters written in the 18th century -- I almost inevitably hear this comment. E-mail, cell phones, Facebook: they've all replaced good old-fashioned letter-writing, goes the lament.

I'm not saying people are wrong about this (although there's something to be said for email, which theoretically can be printed out and preserved for posterity -- and which, also theoretically, can actually be as finely crafted as a good old-fashioned letter). But what they may be wrong about is the assumption that there's something modern about this complaint.

Proof (if any be necessary) that there is, indeed, nothing new under the sun came today as I was perusing a volume published in 1887. Entitled A Girl's Life Eighty Years Ago, the book is a collection of letters by Eliza Southgate Bowne, a remarkable young woman and an apparently prolific correspondent. (In distinctly 21st-century fashion, I was perusing this volume online -- Google Books is amazing!)

In any event, I began by reading the introduction, written by someone named Clarence Cook. Mr. Cook, after praising the quality of Eliza's letters, embarks on a lament about modern life (again, this is 1887): "No doubt we have gained much," Mr. Cook says, from modern inventions that have "reduced time and space to comparative insignificance." But, of course, we've also lost some things -- and "among these losses, that of letter-writing is perhaps the most serious. A whole world of innocent enjoyment for contemporaries and for posterity has been blotted out, and, so far as appears, nothing is taking its place."

And Mr. Cook goes on, in words that sound strangely familiar: "Nowadays no one writes letters, and no one would have time to read them if they were written. Little notes fly back and forth, like swallows, between friend and friend, between parent and child, carrying the news of the day in small morsels easily digested; it is not worth while to tell the whole story with the pen, when it can be told in a few weeks, at the farthest, with the voice. For nobody now is more than a few weeks from anywhere."

We can only speculate what paroxysms of despair Mr. Cook would suffer if he could be revived and plunked down in our midst, where "small morsels" of news do almost literally fly back and forth, and the few weeks of separation he marveled at has become no more than a few hours. He compares letters to the newly invented "toy, the phonograph," which "will repeat what has been confided to it in the very voice of the speaker, with every tone and every inflection as clear as when first it spoke." What, I wonder, would he make of Skype?

And yet, despite the decline of letter-writing bemoaned by Mr. Cook, historians have managed to find a fair amount of correspondence written after 1887. Perhaps letters got shorter (some of those early 19th-century letters were almost novella-length, having been composed over a period of days), but people continued to write them.

And no doubt one or two hundred years from now, historians of the future will find a way to unearth our own version of correspondence, even if it means digging up hard drives from landfills in order to retrieve our e-mails.

What's in a name?

I've noticed that bloggers--and others who have a presence on the Internet--often go by pseudonyms. Sometimes they're clever (a friend of mine who started a blog on English usage chose the moniker "Kitty Literate"). Sometimes they're just puzzling to the uninitiated (several people have asked me why my son blogs as "Vicente" -- it's a long story). And, as with so many things, this phenomenon puts me in mind of the 18th and early 19th century, when it was virtually de rigueur to write under an assumed name.

Perhaps the most famous example is the Federalist Papers--written in defense of the proposed U.S. Constitution--which were first published under the name "Publius," but were in fact the combined effort of John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. The Federalist Papers were themselves a response to two pseudonymous anti-Federalist writers, "Cato" and "Brutus." Who these guys were may still be a mystery.

As you can see, Roman names were big -- this was in keeping with the general feeling that the infant American republic harked back to the Roman one. But there were also lots of whimsical names, more on the order of "Kitty Literate." In 1797, a Richmond newspaper printed an open letter to a Virginia congressman that was signed "Timothy Tickle." And "Mr. Tickle" appended to his own letter another (fictitious) letter, signed "Simon Simple."

Lately I've been reading two magazines published in Baltimore in 1806 and 1807 that abound with these sorts of pen names: Edward Easy, Nathan Scruple, Biddy Fidget, Benjamin Bickerstaff (apparently an allusion to a now forgotten writer named Isaac Bickerstaff).

Why do people, then and now, feel the need to hide behind these inventions? I suppose the obvious answer is that anonymity is liberating -- for better or for worse. But the fact is that many of these names haven't actually guaranteed anonymity. Most of the people who read my son's blog, or my friend's, are friends or acquaintances and aware of the blogger's true identity. And it seems the same was true, in many cases, for the pseudonymous writers of the past. We may not have figured out who Cato and Brutus were, but it's possible many of their contemporaries were able to. The world was smaller then, and the world of people who mattered even smaller.

But for the historian, these playful subterfuges can be a real pain--for example, the authorship of 12 of the 85 different Federalist essays is still uncertain (were they written by Jay, Hamilton, or Madison?) And I've encountered this problem myself: one of the women I'm currently writing about edited a magazine in Baltimore in 1807 under the name of "Beatrice Ironside." (Her explanation for the name was that criticism wouldn't bother her, because she had "iron sides;" as it turned out, she was plenty bothered -- a more appropriate name would have been something like "Beatrice Marshmallow.") But it's clear that her contemporaries soon figured out who she really was (her name was Eliza Anderson). What's not so clear is what else she wrote, and when she started writing.

The magazine that "Beatrice Ironside" edited was called the "Observer," and it was a successor to the "Companion," whose ostensible editor was Edward Easy. The prospectus for the "Observer" says that a new editor is now taking over -- but the prospectus is unsigned, and there's no indication of the editor's gender. Was this "Beatrice," whose name doesn't actually begin appearing until some weeks later? Or did she take over from someone else?

To make things murkier, just before the "Companion" ceased publication in 1806, the editor suddenly starts referring to herself as "she." (In the ancient bound volume I was perusing, some earlier reader had underlined this pronoun and put an exclamation point in the margin -- it was highly unusual, of course, for a woman to be editing anything during this period.) So was this Beatrice/Eliza? There were pieces in the "Companion" published under female names -- even one published under "Eliza" -- but given the predilection for pseudonyms, sometimes of the opposite gender, this doesn't really tell us anything. In fact, it seems unlikely that anything signed "Eliza" would actually have been written by someone named Eliza.

Virtually unsolvable mysteries like this make me glad I'm writing fiction rather than history; I can just decide whether or not I want Beatrice/Eliza to edit the "Companion" and then go on to found the "Observer" -- I don't have to decide whether that really happened. But, in an effort to make the jobs of future historians somewhat easier, I've resolved to continue blogging under my own name -- boring as that may be.

When Americans Die, They Go to Paris

A couple of nights ago I went to see the movie Revolutionary Road, which was both excellent and thought-provoking. And one of the thoughts it provoked was how amazingly persistent the allure of Paris has been for Americans through the years.



The movie (and the book by Richard Yates on which it's based) centers on Frank and April Wheeler, a couple in 1950s suburbia who recall their youthful yearning to be "different" and "special," and think a move to Paris will solve all their problems ("People are alive there," marvels Frank, who visited the city while in the Army). Ernest Hemingway and "the lost generation" made it their mecca in the twenties. The comment that serves as the title for this post is attributed to Oscar Wilde and presumably was uttered sometime in the late 19th century. And as I'm discovering as I research my second novel, even back in the early 19th century some Americans scorned their own country and revered Paris (as well as other parts of Europe) as the source of all things good, beautiful, and sophisticated.



The two 19th-century women whose lives I'm researching lived in Baltimore, then a relatively new city that some of its inhabitants considered a cultural wasteland. As the acid-tongued Baltimore belle Betsy Bonaparte put it, “The men are all merchants ... Beyond their counting-houses they possess not a single idea... The women are all occupied in les details de menage and nursing children; these are useful occupations, but do not render people agreeable to their neighbors.” Like the Wheelers, Betsy was convinced she was special and different; she once said she was never destined to spend her life in Baltimore, and at another time remarked that she preferred death to a life spent there. As a result, she fled to Europe as often as she could, and Paris was one of her favorite haunts. (Not surprisingly, she wasn't too popular with her fellow Baltimoreans!)



The other woman I'm writing about, Eliza Godefroy--a bluestocking who devoured the works of Madame de Stael and other French philosophes--yearned to go to Paris as well, complaining in a letter to a friend that her French husband refused to return there (presumably because he had painful memories of his imprisonment during the Revolution). Ultimately she did end up in France, but not Paris--her husband managed to get an ill-paying job in the provincial town of Laval, which wasn't quite the same. (It's an industrial town, the French equivalent of, say, Akron -- but unlike Akron, it has a beautifully preserved medieval center with an 11th-century castle.)



I can certainly understand the attraction. Every time I go to Paris I fall in love all over again with its beauty. Perhaps it's not the mecca for young Americans who feel special that it was in the past (where do they go now -- Beijing?), but plenty of them still go there -- my son is there right now for example (and he really is special, if I say so myself).



But of course, moving to Paris -- or anywhere else -- isn't necessarily going to solve anyone's problems. Betsy Bonaparte discovered that even in Paris she suffered from ennui (after all, the French invented it!). And it's clear that a move to Paris wouldn't have made Frank and April Wheeler's lives any easier -- they probably would only have realized how truly American they were.

Let It Snow

After a recent light snowfall here in Washington–light, at least, by Chicago standards–our new President was heard to marvel that his daughters’ school (which is also my daughter’s school) was closed. "For what?" he asked. "Some ice?" Welcome to Washington, Mr. President. But would you believe there was a time when snow actually improved the quality of the roads around here?

That would have been in the winter of 1804, a time when the roads leading to and from Washington were in fairly execrable shape (and the roads in Washington, then called Washington City, were practically nonexistent). And why would snow have had a beneficial effect? No, it wasn’t because people had four-wheel drive on their carriages; it was because they used sleighs. Instead of bouncing sharply over ruts and rocks, travelers were able to glide smoothly over a pristine expanse of white stuff.

According to Rosalie Calvert, the mistress of a plantation near Bladensburg, MD–now a suburb of DC–"The snow was deep and stayed on the ground a long time, and we had the pleasure of going to Washington by sleigh several times." (She also mentions that it was so cold they were able to cross the Potomac River on horseback; whoever was the first to test that ice must have had more than the ordinary human share of courage.)

Accidents apparently only added to the fun. One night, coming home from Washington, Mrs. Calvert’s sleigh met up with another one: "the road was narrow, our horses very lively, and in passing the other too fast, we overturned in several feet of snow." Not to worry, though: "Before the gentlemen in the other sleigh could come to our aid, we were already on foot and ready to go on our way. This makes for a diversion of sorts and is pleasant." (These quotations are taken from a remarkable collection of Mrs. Calvert’s letters: Mistress of Riversdale, edited by Margaret Law Callcott.)

In February 1804, Betsy Bonaparte of Baltimore–newly married to Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome–also had a mishap in the snow, which turned out to be equally pleasant. On the way to Washington one night, the couple’s coachman was thrown from his seat. "Mr. Bonaparte jumped out," the bride’s uncle reported, "but could not stop the horses ... Finding her danger increased, [Betsy] opened the door, and jumped out into the snow, without receiving any injury."

And far from bringing things to a halt, the snow brought the crowds out in droves. "Our city, especially Market street, exhibited a lively scene yesterday and today," reported a Baltimore newspaper in January 1804, "from the incessant passing and repassing of sleighs and four!!! sleighs and two!! And sleighs and one!" More dangerous than the traffic were the snowball-throwing boys. After Madame Bonaparte was struck by a snowball, her husband reportedly offered a reward of $500 for the perpetrator, and the paper remarked that "several lads ... have been taken up by the constables."

By March, alas, the snows had melted and the roads were back to their usual condition. "I arrived here this morning," Jerome Bonaparte reported from Washington to his wife back in Baltimore. "The road was terrible, the carriage very sturdy, and Mlle. Spear [a relative] always very brave."

Is there a lesson here for our time–other than that snow is a lot less fun than it used to be? Five inches of snow in London recently brought things there to a screeching halt, making even us Washingtonians look pretty macho by comparison. Should city authorities perhaps try spreading the snow around instead of attempting to clear it? Should we all keep a sleigh in the garage, just in case? And a horse or two to pull it, of course.

Obviously not. The only lesson I can draw from all this is that we’re luckier than we think. We take it for granted that we’ll have roads that are decent except for the few days a year when it snows–instead of the other way around. We complain about potholes, or the traffic on I-95, but can we imagine what life was like when the only road between Baltimore and Washington was made of dirt?

One thing about studying the past: it makes you realize that sometimes we’re fortunate to have even the things we complain about.

Dipping My Toe Into the Blogosphere

I spend a good deal of my time these days in the early 19th century (at the moment I'm immersed in the spring of 1804), so it feels a little weird to be dipping my toe into the very 21st century arena of the blogosphere. Let's just say it's a bit of a stretch.

But I've been posting what I've called a "blog" on my website for the last year or so, and I've found that I've enjoyed it. And others have told me they've enjoyed reading it. But a while ago my son (who blogs as "Vicente," and whose very interesting and eclectic blog you can read here) informed me that what I've got there isn't really a blog: people can't leave comments, I haven't been including links to other websites and blogs, etc., etc.. So, partly to prove to my kids that I really do live in the 21st century (something they seem to doubt from time to time), I've decided to start a real blog. (Hey, Vicente, did you notice that link I just inserted?)

As I've been doing on my old blog (or rather, "blog"), I plan to write about things that relate to my novel, A More Obedient Wife, such as:

• parallels or contrasts between life in the 1790s and today,


• how the Supreme Court has changed in the last 200 years, and


• how women's lives have changed.

I'm sure I'll also be blogging about things that relate to the novel I'm currently working on as well, which is set a few years later (hence my immersion at the moment in the spring of 1804). And I'll probably also write about more general topics, such as the challenges and rewards of using the lives of real, and relatively obscure, historical figures as fodder for fiction.

I'm hoping to post a couple of times a month, and I'm very much hoping to hear from readers--that's one of the main reasons I'm switching to this format. As for the "blog" posts on my website, they're all still available there, at least at the moment: just click here. You'll also find a lot more information there about myself and my book, A More Obedient Wife.

As I do so often, I wonder what the characters in my novels--almost all of them based on real people who left behind letters recording their thoughts and feelings--would have made of all this. They lived in an era when communication was painfully slow, when it might take three weeks to get a letter from Boston to, say, Charleston, S.C., and two months to get a letter from Europe to the United States. Letters often never made it to their destination at all, for one reason or another, so if you were writing anything important you sent several copies of it. Newspapers were dense and, at least to the modern eye, difficult to read--the first couple of pages were basically a bunch of classified ads--and full of dubious information and rumor.

Aside from that last point (which some might say also characterizes the internet), things have changed beyond recognition. We've come to expect instantaneous communication; if my internet access goes down, or my cell phone goes missing, I start to panic.

But in at least one sense, it occurs to me that this blog is a return to the past. One of the two women I'm now writing about started a magazine in Baltimore in 1807, when she was 27 years old. She was certainly one of the first female magazine editors in the United States, if not the first, and she faced some obstacles that women writers no longer have to worry about: when she threw in the towel after a year, she blamed the demise of the magazine largely on people who didn't believe a woman was capable of being at the helm of such a publication.

But she also heard back from her readers--big-time. Some of them sent her articles, which she published. But many of them sent her comments, which, for the most part, she also published and responded to, to such an extent that at times the magazine feels like a spirited conversation. That element has been missing from publications until recently. Sure, newspapers and magazines publish letters to the editor, but usually they choose to print only a small fraction of the mail they receive. But now, thanks to 21st-century technology, that spirited conversation has become possible again. And now that I've dipped my toe in the blogosphere, I'm getting eager to jump in.