All Behind the Book essays

When I first started writing Wilderness, I had no specific agenda in mind other than to try and tell a good story about an old man and his dog. I had no notion that my character, Abel Truman, was an American Civil War veteran—let alone a Northerner who had fought for the Confederacy. All I knew was that he was a physically broken, emotionally bereft recluse whose reunion with society would reveal, painfully and irresistibly, the still-vital heart within him.

Soon enough though, my interest in the Civil War—and Abel’s complicated attitudes toward that conflict—began to assert itself in the narrative. The war’s horrific violence—with death tolls exceeding anything the country, or the world, had ever seen—soon transcended its overtly political origins, much as Abel’s character and story began to change, to enlarge with its telling. The simple tale of an old man and his dog grew more complex—more personal but, at the same time, encompassing a broader view of the America that was and the America that is. As Abel says to Edward when trying to explain to the Indian boy what the country had become: “We were one thing—now we’re something else. The war mixed it all up.”

When he enlists, Abel Truman is already a wrecked man. Having assumed responsibility for his infant daughter’s crib death, and with his wife driven mad with grief, he finds himself wandering, numb, steeped in drink, expelled from the Garden of domestic bliss. He lets this tragedy define his life, and when he finally enlists for the Confederacy it is simply because that is where he is at the time, geographically, and because of the hope that the annealing fire of war might be the thing to either make him whole again or end his suffering. For Abel, the causes of the war—States Rights and the “peculiar institution” that drove the armies against each other—is no factor at all.

The place feels melancholy as a Sunday evening, and the moment I stepped from the car onto Saunder’s Field, I knew that this was where the cauldron of Abel Truman’s warring days would reach its boil.

But as a foot soldier directly responsible for the bloody work of those days, Abel has to participate and, when his comrades in arms are killed or wounded, he has to respond. And when he encounters the evils of slavery firsthand, he finally realizes the intensely personal dimension of the war that lies beyond politics and even bloodshed. The war is the end point of this period of Abel’s life. His life in exile afterwards—living in a place as far away as he can possibly get from the landscapes of war—is simply what Abel has to do to come to grips with and understand everything he’s seen and everything he’s done.

To make Abel’s interior journey believable, I quickly realized I needed a far more solid understanding of thewaythe war was fought. Before writing Wilderness, I knew very little of the American Civil War and so began my study where it made sense to begin: with the solid basics of James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom and the lyric romanticism of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative. Afterwards, I moved on to specific battle histories and was introduced to the fields of Shiloh, Antietam, Chickamauga and Chancellorsville. I spent six months on Gettysburg alone. All the while, I was looking for the “worst” of those awful battles to serve as the cauldron that would boil off Abel’s indifference.

Somewhere along the line, I read about the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864. The first clash between Lee and Grant, the Wilderness marked the last, best chance for the Confederacy to turn the war back in their favor. Over the course of the battle that took place in those tangled woods, there was little in the way of panoramas of ranked lines clashing and much in the way of soldiers using the bayonet and musket-butt against each other. The fighting was by necessity close and by inclination personal. It was the last time the oft-retreated Army of the Potomac would cross the Rapidan River and the last time the Army of Northern Virginia would mount a real offensive. So there is a sense of desperation—of endings and finalities—palpable in the descriptions of the fighting that went on in those dark woods. And when I visited the battlefield, I found the Wilderness was a dark place. The trees there are close and strange and would have been closer, stranger still in the spring of 1864. The place feels melancholy as a Sunday evening, and the moment I stepped from the car onto Saunder’s Field, I knew that this was where the cauldron of Abel Truman’s warring days would reach its boil.

The story of Abel—broken, suffering—became, in the course of its telling, the story of America at war and after. What it was and what it became. Broken, yes, but far stronger at the break.

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Read our review of Wilderness.

As a teenager I spent four, sometimes five, nights a week in the basement of an old bank, a large low-ceilinged room that had once—a yellowed sign told us—served as a bomb shelter. The ballet mistress would call out, “A little more sweat, if you please,” and at the barre, we would plié more deeply, arch our backs more fully. Sometimes we would have a moment’s rest, and I would roll stiffness from my shoulders, gazing at one of the Edgar Degas prints tacked to the walls. I felt kinship with his ballet girls, sometimes glorious on the stage but as often just simply scratching their backs or limbering at the barre. I saw their heaving ribs, their exhaustion, their thighs trained to roll outward from the hips. I saw their love of dance, too—no different from my own. No wonder, then, that decades later a documentary on Degas’ most famous sculpture, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, should introduce me to the protagonist of my second novel, The Painted Girls.

The ballet offered a chance for a daughter to escape the gutter if she had talent and ambition—or if she were able to attract the attentions of a wealthy admirer.

Marie van Goethem, I would learn, had modeled for the work and lived on the lower slopes of Montmartre a few blocks from Degas’ studio. Her father, a tailor, was dead, and her mother was a laundress. She trained at the Paris Opéra dance school and was later promoted to the corps de ballet. It was the dream of many a Parisian laundress or sewing maid. The ballet offered a chance for a daughter to escape the gutter if she had talent and ambition—or if she were able to attract the attentions of a wealthy admirer.

Along with their own private boxes at the Paris Opéra, men who held season tickets had entry to the Foyer de la Danse, a space built to encourage encounters with the young ballet girls. It was a sort of gentleman's club, a place where highlife met lowlife, where mistresses were sought by industrialists and noblemen with clout enough to advance a girl’s career.

When Degas unveiled Little Dancer in 1881, at once the public linked her with a life of corruption and young girls for sale. She was called a “flower of the gutter.” Her face, they said, was “imprinted with the detestable promise of every vice.”

This seedier side of the Paris Opéra flew in the face of my teenage imaginings about the ballet girls tacked to the walls. The lives of those girls, and, more specifically, the life of Marie van Goethem, differed from my own in startling ways. Hers was a story I wanted to tell.

The documentary proceeded, touching on a second story: that of pair of teenage boys Degas had drawn in the criminal court, on trial for a sensational murder. The resultant portrait was exhibited alongside Little Dancer, and art historians contend that more than a shared exhibition links the artworks. They suggest that in each, Degas sought to imply the depravity of his subjects.

Such an intention was easy enough to swallow. “Scientific” findings of the day supported notions of innate criminality and particular facial features—low forehead, forward-thrusting jaw—that marked a person as having a tendency toward crime. Those features are incorporated into the portrait of the teenage boys, and even more telling, Degas titled the work “Criminal Physiognomies.” The criminal features are apparent in the face of the Little Dancer, too, and given the public’s reaction to the work, it would seem Degas had succeeded.

What fascinated me most of all, though, as I delved deeper into the stories of Marie and the boys, was the possibility that the link between the artworks went further. All three youths had inhabited the same underbelly of Paris, and I could not stop myself from imagining that their paths had crossed, the ways in which such a meeting might have altered destinies.

I would tell both stories, and I would intertwine their lives, too.

Cathy Marie Buchanan explores the dark side of the Belle Epoque in The Painted Girls, the story of real-life sisters Marie and Antoinette van Goethem—and their artistic careers in a time when such pursuits often made for difficult lives for women. After a childhood of dance lessons, Buchanan currently limits her artistic pursuits to writing, which she does from her home in Toronto.

More than a decade ago, I was researching ante­bellum and Civil War-era quilts for my fourth novel when I discovered a photograph of an antique masterpiece.

Arranged in the medallion style, with appliquéd eagles, embroidered flowers, meticulously pieced hexagons and deep red fringe, the quilt was the work of a gifted needleworker, its striking beauty unmarred by the shattered silk and broken threads that gave evidence to its age.

The caption noted that the quilt had been sewn from scraps of Mary Todd Lincoln’s gowns by her dressmaker and confidante, a former slave named Elizabeth Keckley. I marveled at the compelling story those brief lines suggested—a courageous woman’s rise from slavery to freedom, an improbable friendship that ignored the era’s sharp distinctions of class and race, the confidences shared between a loyal dressmaker and a controversial, divisive First Lady.

A few years later, while researching my Civil War novel, The Union Quilters, I realized that many of my secondary sources cited the same work—Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, Elizabeth Keckley’s 1868 memoir. I immediately found a reprint and plunged into her story, which told of her harrowing years as a slave, her struggle for freedom and her ascendance as the most popular dressmaker of Washington’s elite, including the new president’s wife. Sewing in the Lincoln family’s chambers within the White House, Keckley observed Abraham and Mary Lincoln in their most private, unguarded moments, and with them she witnessed some of the most glorious and tragic events in the nation’s history.

For years afterward, I longed to delve more deeply into Keckley’s story, to learn about the woman she was beyond her friendship with Mary Lincoln, to discover what had happened after the closing passages of her memoir and to uncover the details of everyday life in wartime Washington. How, I wondered, had Keckley spent that tense and fateful day in 1860 when the increasingly divided nation awaited the results of the election that would send Abraham Lincoln to the White House? What emotions had swept through her when invasion by the Confederate Army seemed imminent? What sights, sounds and smells had she encountered while all around her the capital became an armed camp?

And the most provocative question of all: How had the publication of her memoir transformed Keckley’s life?

As she awaited the publication of Behind the Scenes, Keckley worried that she might be criticized for revealing too much about the private lives of President Lincoln and the First Lady. Her fears proved all too prescient, making the last chapters of her remarkable life as compelling as any that had come before.

Elizabeth Keckley’s relationship with Mary Todd Lincoln is the focus of Jennifer Chiaverini’s new novel, Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker, a compelling fictional account of Keckley’s life.

The year was 1996. I stepped off the Nantucket Ferry clutching the little flyer I’d picked up onboard: Come and see the home of the famous girl astronomer from Nantucket. I was 25 and on my own. I had no agenda. I’d never been to Nantucket. Girl astronomer? Why not.

Main Street took me past boutiques and restaurants and buildings that looked like they hadn’t changed in a century or three. Before long, I reached the little lane where Maria Mitchell had lived and worked. I was entranced by the stillness of the place; grey sky and grey shingles and grey cobblestones commingled, blurring the distance between past and future. I had to know more about this teenaged mathematician and astronomer who’d discovered a comet while in her 20s, and I set about learning everything I could about her life and times. 

Born into a tight-knit Quaker community in 1818, “Miss Mitchell” learned navigation and basic astronomy from her father, whom she assisted with rooftop observations used to “rate”—or, adjust—the chronometers of the island’s legendary whaling fleet. She excelled in math but couldn’t go to college—there were barely a handful of options open to women then—so she studied on her own, while family friends who ran the Harvard Observatory kept her apprised of news and innovations in the field. Rather than marry and begin a family, she spent her youth on a little platform attached to her roof, in every kind of weather, scouring the night skies for the appearance of a comet. If she found one before anyone else in the world, she could win a monetary prize from the King of Denmark, and—more importantly—recognition for her accomplishments. 

I had to know more about this teenaged mathematician and astronomer who’d discovered a comet while in her 20s.

On October 1, 1847, she found what she sought—though her hesitation in reporting it almost cost her the award. Luckily, after an exchange of letters among important men (!) from Cambridge to Washington to Europe, her “priority” was established and Comet Mitchell was recorded for posterity. With that finding, she became famous, was hired as a “computer” for the National Almanac, and, 13 years after the discovery, was the first person hired by Matthew Vassar for his women’s college in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Great story, right? But I knew nothing about Quakers, astronomy, whaling or 19th-century New England. Determined to get the facts right and adhere closely to the life of this inspiring woman, I spent year after year doing research and rewriting the same chapters over and over. No matter how much I learned, though, something felt like it was missing. A reconstructed version of Maria Mitchell’s life wasn’t the story I wanted to tell, after all. To get to the heart of that girl, on the roof, searching the night sky for something that would change her life, I was going to have to invent her, and the people around her as well: friends and foes, her loved ones and her beloved. 

Thus began the long, slow work of puzzling together the setting and endeavors of a real person’s life with an invented character and plot. I kept some details and made up others; re-created scenes that had occurred, but changed the time or place in which they happened. By the time I was done I’d forgotten, in some cases, what was “real” and what I’d made up. Thankfully, I kept good notes. And I had a lot of help along the way, from research fellowships and stints at libraries and historical associations up and down the New England seaboard.

I hope that the novel and its protagonist, Hannah Gardner Price, bring much-deserved attention to the life and work of Maria Mitchell. But I hope she stands on her own, too. In truth, Hannah is a hybrid of every young woman I read about who longed to go to college, to accomplish something beyond the domestic sphere, to make a contribution to society commensurate with her intellect and her passions. Without trailblazers like Miss Mitchell and her contemporaries, I certainly wouldn’t be writing this today. For this, I am eternally grateful.

Amy Brill is a writer and producer who has worked for PBS and MTV. A Movement of Stars is her first novel and was inspired by the remarkable life of Maria Mitchell. Brill lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters. Find out more on her website.

Linda Spalding—who has lived in Canada for 30 years—has written fiction and nonfiction over her long and varied career. With her third novel, The Purchase, which won Canada's 2012 Governor General's Award for Fiction, she draws from her own family history for the very first time. It's the story of a Quaker man who moves to Virginia in 1798 and finds his abolitionist principles tested by the reality of the slave economy. In an exclusive behind-the-book story, Spalding writes about her discovery of this story and how it inspired this poignant historical novel.

My grandfather’s grandfather left an established life in Pennsylvania with a wagon full of children bound for the far western edge of Virginia. The year was 1798. When he finally stopped at the edge of what was then the United States, just a few miles from the Cumberland Gap, he erected a small cabin, the pieces of which still lie scattered on the ground of Jonesville, Virginia. 

Daniel’s migration brought wealth to the family but it cost us everything we valued.

As a child, this story struck me as wildly adventurous, but also troubling. What father would take such risks? How long was the trip? Was it cold? What did they eat? And why had they left? What was wrong with life in Pennsylvania? “He was disowned by his community,” my father admitted once over his nightly highball. “He was sent off into exile!” I learned that Daniel Dickinson, this migratory ancestor, was a Quaker, one of those good people of strong moral purpose and fervent belief who began abolitionism. Therefore, my father’s next admission horrified me. “We didn’t stay long in the south,” he said. “And we freed all our slaves before we left.”

My father was a civil rights lawyer and I had always maintained absolute faith in our familial virtue. Old Daniel a slave owner! What eclipse of honor could have brought him to such a choice? What must he have felt when he first raised his hand at an auction in order to buy a human being? How did he live with his very well-developed conscience after making that unconscionable choice? I think the puzzle of this must have nagged at me for many years as I became more and more interested in Quakerism, participated in meetings of worship and made a pilgrimage to early Quaker sites with a group of international students. Never were there people of sturdier ethical fabric than the early Quakers.

Then I was given the genealogy a paternal aunt had carefully prepared and found part of an answer. Daniel Dickinson had lost his first wife in childbirth and quickly married a Methodist. That was all there was to the exile. Needing a mother for his many children, he must have felt desperate. Then, shunned for marrying outside the faith, he had packed his family into a wagon and driven them to the edge of the world. And there, in that wilderness, he had found dilemmas insurmountable.

I made a journey by car along the route Daniel took when he left Pennsylvania, and by the time I reached the little spot in Virginia where he finally pulled to a halt and unloaded his family, I began to understand. In 1798, there was no town in that wild place. There was a bit of land he could have in exchange for one of the warrants he’d brought from Pennsylvania. Land warrants, these were, given to veterans of the war with King George. How did Daniel come by them? He had certainly never fought. He was a pacifist, and anyway too young for that war. The warrant he exchanged for his first six acres was worth $50. I was able to find the deed and other documents in the courthouse. With children too young to help him farm, he needed a worker. And there was no paid labor to be had.

I stepped over the stones of his fallen chimney and saw, adrift in the grass, three graves. I saw the pretty creek and the mansion his son had built in 1830, every red brick of which had been molded by slaves. What must have been the reaction of those children who had been brought up so diligently, torn from their home, and brought to a place where their father lost his way? Daniel’s migration brought wealth to the family but it cost us everything we valued.

For a novelist, all of it had to be imagined and felt right down to the bones, remembering that class and race and religion determined everything in 1798. The smallest differences caused distrust, hostility and violence. And when you migrated from one place to another, social signals were often impossible to navigate. Quakers. Methodists. Africans. Confederates. There was all of that to understand. But grief and shame and envy have felt much the same to everyone in every time. My characters were waiting in the yellowed pages of that genealogy with their passions and their frailties, their crimes, their secrets and their sorrows. Each of them had a story to tell.