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.

When Coll Coyle, a struggling tenant farmer in 1832 Ireland, accidentally kills the landowner he works for, retribution is fierce. Forced to flee the country for America, Coyle exchanges one bleak existence for another when he finds work digging the rail beds for the Pennsylvania railroad. And he’s still being pursued by the relentless overseer, Faller, who is determined to see Coyle punished. That’s the premise of Paul Lynch’s powerful Red Sky in Morning. Here, Lynch shares the inspiration for this carefully crafted and highly praised first novel.      

I spent years trying not to be a writer. I gave it my best shot. I gorged on the literary greats and believed it would be folly to try and emulate. Better to quit while you are ahead, I thought, and avoid any embarrassment. I took the dream I had carried all my life and quietly buried it.

I wrote music and played in a band. I became a sub-editor on a national newspaper and learned the technique of writing and editing. I became that newspaper’s film critic and honed consciously my grasp of narrative. I began to notice that though I loved deeply what I was doing, my soul was not singing. Something deep in my spirit was not being addressed. My weekly film essays were developing a decidedly literary bent. I was starting to sound like a frustrated novelist.

"I wanted to strip Irish history of its clichés and find in it something meaningful for a new generation."

I had an epiphany on a hillside on Lipari when I was 30. I knew in that moment I had failed in my bid not to be a writer. That my psyche was starting to buckle. I knew in that moment that I would write for the rest of my life. I rushed back to my hotel and began to write my first short story.

Bubbling deep was the wellspring of a novel. I had watched on Irish television a documentary called The Ghosts of Duffy’s Cut. What happened at the railway dig near Malvern, Pennsylvania is a mystery. In 1832, 57 Irishmen arrived in America and went to work on the Pennsylvania Railroad. A few months later, every one of them was dead. Cholera had struck the camp, but it is believed that what took place was mass murder. A good many of these men came from the area of Donegal where I grew up.

Something powerful struck. It was 2009. Ireland was sliding into economic depression. People were beginning to emigrate again. I saw in Duffy’s Cut a moment in history that could speak with the power of myth. I wanted to strip Irish history of its clichés and find in it something meaningful for a new generation that found itself angry and powerless.

I had to learn to carve writing time out of my hectic week. I wrote on my day off and at evenings. I used up all my holiday time to write. I wrote through numbing tiredness in the hope that what I put down would later make sense. I learned that once you commit your consciousness to the page, it can always be rewritten. That the real work of writing is rewriting. So I rewrote and rewrote until I could hear the book hum.

It took me just under three years to write Red Sky in Morning. When I started writing the book, I had a full-time job and neighbours each side that were long-settled in the area. By the time the book was finished, I had lost my job, the newspaper I worked for had collapsed, and both of my neighbours had emigrated to America. While the past had become the present, I was writing the present through the past.

There were many things I liked about my Grandmother Puffer’s home: cartoons on television (We didn’t have a TV at home: hippie parents.), Cheerios for breakfast (ditto), and all manner of ancestral relics. There was a genuine family tree—branches wider than my arms—and artifacts like a chair that Myles Standish had sat in (and in which we were not to sit) and a bugle that had been played at President Wilson’s inauguration. More than all this stuff, there were the tales my grandmother could tell.

Every April, on Patriot’s Day, we’d go with my grandmother to see the re-enactment of the battles of Lexington and Concord, and, once back at her house, I could count on her to tell Deborah’s story. “Can you imagine?” she’d say. “She so wanted to join the army that she ran away and put on men’s clothes. I guess she had watched boys her age go off to be soldiers and wanted a chance to serve. But can you imagine?”

I was certain that, if the Revolutionary War started up again, it wouldn’t take me half a minute to pull on some britches and join the army.

I could. I was 6 or 7 or 8, a little girl. But even then I knew that wasn’t exactly who or what I was. And I could imagine Deborah quite well. I could picture how her skirts and apron and lace cap must have felt: just like the tights and dress and pinafore my mother made me wear to birthday parties. I absolutely knew that Deborah, from her spinning wheel, had looked at boys in her town marching off with the militia the same way that I looked at my brother when he went racing out the door to play with BB guns, while my friends brought over Barbies. And I was certain that, if the Revolutionary War started up again and someone rode on a horse through my town ringing a bell and proclaiming that the British were coming, it wouldn’t take me half a minute to pull on some britches and join the army.

That said, it wasn’t until I was 17 years old that I figured out I was transgender—to finally say that I was a man and would live the rest of my life as one. I remember that it felt hard: difficult to explain to people, tough to imagine exactly how I would manage all the legal and personal details. It was unspeakably nice to have Deborah’s story there, waiting for me. What a comfort to know that someone had done this before, had crossed this line—done it in 1782, well before gender identity was a concept—and had family that was still proud of her to this day.

When I sat down to write Revolutionary, I read my grandmother’s volume of family genealogy and then Alfred Young’s history of Deborah. And I counselled myself: this is Deborah’s story, not your story. I wanted to let her character emerge fully, without bearing the imprint of my own. Yet, so often as I wrote, I thought—she would have worried about using the bathroom . . . she would have glowed when someone called her “young man”. . . just like me. There were many times when I felt that point of contact through the page.

There were, however, just as many spots where our stories diverged. I wish I could have had Deborah turn west at the end of the novel; I would have liked nothing better than for her to continue living as a man and to find a little farm out in the new Ohio territory, even if that meant living the rest of her life alone. That’s what I would have wanted to do. But that isn’t what she did. She went home, to an aunt and uncle and to a place that she’d missed. She went home and married and had children and became Deborah again—something I could never imagine doing. Yet, if she had not . . . I wouldn’t be able to write her story. 

Born and raised in Paris, Maine, Alex Myers was raised as a girl (Alice). He came out as transgender at 17 and earned degrees from Harvard and Brown before attending the Vermont College of Fine Arts to study fiction writing—where he began his debut novel. Revolutionary is the story of his ancestor Deborah Samson Gannett, who disguised herself as a man in order to join the Continental Army and fight the British. Myers currently teaches English at St. George’s School, where he lives with his wife and two cats.