I almost didn’t write The Other Einstein. The little-known story of Mileva Marić, who made a heroic ascent from the misogynistic backwater of 19th-century Eastern Europe to become one of Europe’s first female physicists, kept calling to me, begging to be written. But the tale necessarily involved a depiction of Albert Einstein, the fellow Zurich Polytechnic student who wooed Mileva for years before their marriage in 1903—and who wanted to face that hurdle?

The idea of writing about the so-called secular saint, who was chosen as the Person of the Century by Time magazine and galvanized not only science but also the cultural and political landscape with his genius, daunted me. Obviously. Not to mention that people hold many preconceptions about Albert Einstein, and I wasn’t certain that I wanted to challenge them with The Other Einstein. 

But then I realized that The Other Einstein wasn’t his story. It was her story. One that had been buried by time and prejudice and misconceptions. And I realized that I was honor-bound to excavate Mileva from the detritus of the past and share her with the world. 

So I faced my discomfort with writing about one of the world’s most famous figures head-on. I dove deep into the world of 19th-century science. I tried to immerse myself in whatever details I could cobble together about Mileva, a surprisingly challenging task given that she had been married to Einstein for 16 years. While countless tomes exist about him and his work, Mileva doesn’t figure prominently in many of them. 

Then I discovered Mileva’s letters. Written to family members, friends and, of course, Albert, those letters became my window into her life. They enabled me to imagine myself as the young Mileva. So tiny, her family joked that they needed to put stones in her pockets to keep the wind from blowing her away. So startlingly brilliant that her father fought against the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s laws preventing females from attending high school to secure her place in an all-male upper school. So different from all the other girls that she received the brunt of their youthful mockery. And so physically deformed in her hips that she believed no one would ever want to marry her.

In becoming Mileva, I began to see Albert Einstein through her eyes. He became a roguish, charismatic college student. He changed into a youthful, open-minded scientific partner and collaborator. He shined as a violinist who accompanied her singing with the gusto of a fellow musician. He transformed from a friend into a determined and ardent lover, who morphed again into a husband and father, bringing both tremendous joy and heartbreaking disappointment. 

No longer the wild-haired scientific icon, Albert Einstein became a person. Marvelous yet flawed, as all people are. This metamorphosis, achieved only after long months of research, freed me from my fears. And I was able to write about Albert as Mileva experienced him. 

But no matter how comfortable I became writing about Albert Einstein, The Other Einstein never became his story. It always remained hers.

Marie Benedict practiced law for more than 10 years before launching a career as a novelist. The Other Einstein is the first in a planned series telling the stories of women lost to history. Benedict, who has also published three thrillers as Heather Terrell, lives in Pittsburgh with her family.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Other Einstein.

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

With her new novel, I, Eliza Hamilton, bestselling author Susan Holloway Scott brings to life the story of Alexander Hamilton’s wife, Eliza. Readers will discover a novel of rich and fascinating details—and at its heart, an admirable woman of great devotion and courage.

If you visit the grave of Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton (1757-1854) in New York City, you’ll see that her simple stone describes her only in terms of the two most important men in her life. She’s her father’s daughter, and her husband’s wife, and that is all.

True, she’s best remembered today as the wife of Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), a Revolutionary War hero, statesman, politician and abolitionist, the first Secretary of the Treasury, a signer of the Constitution, the founder of the American financial system and, perhaps most famously, the only Founding Father to die from a duel.

You might also have heard that Eliza’s husband inspired a certain award-winning Broadway musical that carries his name.

But like so many women of the past, Eliza’s own story has been overshadowed by that brilliant husband. She didn’t help her place in posterity by destroying (or permitting to be destroyed) most of her letters, and thereby virtually eliminating her own words from history. As a result, she’s too often been dismissed by historians, who variously describe her as shy and reclusive, a saint, a homebody and even a victim.

With my new historical novel, I, Eliza Hamilton, I’m determined to change that. I hunted for the “real” Eliza at the Schuyler Mansion, her family’s home in Albany, New York, and the Grange, the house she and Alexander built in New York City, and visited other places in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania that she would have known. I searched for clues to her in historical societies, libraries and museums, poring over the fading ink of 18th-century letters. I was even fortunate enough to see—and touch—the gold wedding ring that Alexander slipped on her finger when they married in 1780.

And I found Eliza, too, in the letters of others who knew and loved her, in portraits, in memoirs and in her charitable work. She was the mother of eight children, who recalled her perseverance and devotion through the most difficult of times. She was a trusted, affectionate daughter and sister in the large Schuyler family. A list of her acquaintances reads like a who’s-who of early American history, including Martha and George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, Dolley and James Madison—and those are only a few of those who knew her.

Most poignantly, Eliza’s presence remains in the letters that Alexander wrote to her over the 24 years that covered their courtship and marriage. There’s no doubt that they loved one another dearly, and that that love supported Eliza not only throughout Alexander’s life, but in the long years afterwards.

As a widow (she survived her husband by more than 50 years), Eliza continued a lifetime of kindness and generosity to become an advocate for the poor women and children of New York City. She helped found an orphanage whose mission continues to this day in the social service organization Graham Windham, and she served as the institution’s directress until she was 91.

But all that is only the beginning of what I discovered. Eliza Hamilton was intelligent and resourceful and strong, a woman who lived in the thick of some of the most turbulent and exciting times in American history. Her life and marriage were filled with love, passion, regard and devotion, but also were marred by public scandal and unimaginable tragedies that broke her heart, but not her spirit. I’m honored to tell her story.

Scott is the bestselling author of over 50 historical novels and historical romances. Learn more about her book—and Eliza Hamilton—on her website and blog: www.susanhollowayscott.com

Author photo by David Campli Studio

Immerse yourself in the milieu of 1700s South Carolina, where 16-year-old Eliza Lucas is left in charge of her family’s three plantations. With her new novel, The Indigo Girl, bestselling author Natasha Boyd draws from the true story of Eliza Lucas Pinckney for a story of ambition, betrayal and sacrifice—and at its core, the secret process of making indigo dye.

Boyd, the author of contemporary romantic Southern fiction and other novels of historical fiction, shares the inspiration behind The Indigo Girl.

People will tell you the Lowcountry begins a slow but irrevocable seduction on all those who venture within its boundaries. For me, it would take several visits, falling in love with a Lowcountry man and ultimately moving there, for the seduction to be complete.

Little did I know it would lead me to writing a book, The Indigo Girl, about Charleston’s beloved Eliza Lucas Pinckney. When you marry a man from Charleston, South Carolina, hearing the name Pinckney sort of settles into the general noise of life. It was a name I heard, but didn’t give too much thought to. I grew up in Europe, so I was used to being surrounded by history and, to my shame, probably took it for granted. Besides, we made our home in Atlanta, not Charleston, so unless we were visiting family I never thought much about it, beyond seeing the occasional sign for the Charles Pinckney historical site.

A move to Hilton Head Island in 2010 would change that forever. Lacking the beautiful architecture of Charleston, Hilton Head has a different sort of charm, predominantly nature-based. Every time you drive onto the island, you cross over Pinckney Island National Wildlife Refuge, an island formerly owned by, of course, the Pinckneys. But it was at a local gallery exhibit showcasing artists who work with indigo where I first truly heard Eliza’s story. A 16-year-old girl in the 1700s had been left in charge of her father’s plantations? I sidled closer. She was tricked and set up to fail in her attempt at growing lucrative indigo by a man her father sent to help her? I no longer pretended to eavesdrop. I was rapt. She taught her slaves to read in return for them helping her make the dye?

Well, it was a done deal. Almost.

Trying to get Eliza’s story right kept me up at night. There was a story between the pages of the texts and the letters she wrote. There were differences between what she wrote when she was young and how she looked back on her life. That shouldn’t be a surprise, obviously, as like most humans she had grown and matured over the course of her life. But I felt a little bit like an amateur sculptor chiseling away at a valuable block of marble, knowing that a statue of Venus could materialize if I could just work at the right angle. I saturated myself in her letters and all available mentions of her I could find, and then . . . I put them aside.

This will be where the hardcore historians wince. But here’s the thing: The story, her story, was in there, but the constraints of the available texts were like prison bars preventing the “story” from unfurling. There’s an underlying structure to most storytelling that any experienced genre fiction novelist or screenwriter will tell you. As humans we respond to this story structure. If it is done right, there’ll be a feeling of satisfaction upon completion of the story. We’ll sigh when we close the book, whether we’re happy about the ending or even if we’re sad.

We know the hero or heroine will be put upon to start a journey of some kind. There’ll be forces working against them. At some point, they’ll reach a reckoning to rise to their fullest potential, only to have the rug pulled out from under them, for the unthinkable to happen. Then there’ll be a final battle, a test, from which our hero or heroine will finally emerge victorious and be permanently changed into their new, stronger self.

The story of Eliza’s battle with indigo is such a story. And it was a battle. She was thwarted at every turn, either by her own or others’ ignorance, by nature or simply straight malice. She drew upon her inner strength to overcome these challenges. The end result being that her success with indigo overcame a challenge for South Carolina, and ultimately the United States of America. She is, quite simply, a woman history should never have forgotten.

I hope now they’ll remember her.

There are 3,000 letters between First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, then a prominent female journalist, in 18 large, heavy boxes in the archives of the FDR Library in Hyde Park. I first read about the letters, written between 1932 and Eleanor Roosevelt’s death in 1962, in Blanche Wiesen Cook’s exceptional biography, Eleanor Roosevelt (Viking, 1992). She quotes from the letters generously, concluding that the two women were lovers. I went and read the letters. No wild speculation was required.

“I long to kiss the south-east corner of your lips . . . ” and

“My dear, if you meet me, may I forget there are other people present or must I behave?” and

“ . . . I went and kissed your photograph instead and tears were in my eyes. Please keep most of my heart in Washington as long as I’m here, for most of mine is with you!”

These are not the kind of things that I have ever said to just-a-friend, no matter how close. But Blanche Wiesen Cook was pilloried by other historians in 1992 for examining the facts and the letters and concluding that Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok were not just good friends, not just in love, but lovers. Within five years, most of those historians contacted Cook privately and apologized saying, Gee, I finally read the letters. You’re right. (Oops.)

Ken Burns, a great burnisher of the Roosevelt name, is one of the last hold-outs, feeling, apparently, that although Teddy’s maniacal escapades in Africa and FDR’s numerous love affairs only brighten their images, Eleanor Roosevelt’s long love affair was just . . . tabloid gossip. His documentary on the Roosevelts aggravated me as much as his one on jazz had delighted me.

“I assume when you say a relationship you are assuming that there was a sexual relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok. We have no evidence whatsoever of that, and none of the historians and experts believe it,” Burns said at a television critics event in September 2014. “This is an intimate [look at the Roosevelts], not a tabloid, and we just don’t know. . . . We have to be very careful because sometimes we want to read into things that aren’t there.”

And sometimes, Mr. Burns, a smoking cigar is, indeed, a smoking cigar (to paraphrase both Blanche Wiesen Cook and Sigmund Freud).

The thousands of beautifully written—and beautifully penned—letters between these two women brought them to life for me, from their early attraction to their burning passion (which both of them, as staid middle-aged ladies, found hilarious, unexpected and irresistible) to their 30-year friendship and all of its ups and downs, from feelings of neglect, to feelings of possessiveness, to cheerful gossip and the absolute unbreakable private Christmas party of two, and to their grief at the separation they both chose. Although I wish I’d seen the letters Hick had burnt (too racy, she said), the 18 boxes gave me Eleanor and Lorena, Darling and Dearest, determined, despairing, purposeful, wild and restrained, passionate and incapable of parting—and they gave me this book.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of White Houses.

“How many of us have seen our friends stepping into a bad situation and worried over what—if anything—to say, knowing our counsel is unwanted?”

Head to Las Vegas and leave your past at the door. That is Lily Decker’s hope when she trades in her brutal childhood in Kansas for the glamour of the Vegas Strip in 1957.

Elizabeth J. Church’s new novel, All the Beautiful Girls, follows Lily through her difficult, abusive childhood, when her only trustworthy adult is the man who had caused the car accident that killed her parents. But bright lights and big dreams are always on the horizon, and at 18 years old, Lily, calling herself Ruby Wilde, discovers a showgirl life filled with parties, new friends and every luxury she ever wished for. But her heart was broken at a young age, and some pain cannot be avoided forever.

Church shares an in-depth look at the questions that drove the creation of this heartbreaking, unforgettable character.

It’s frightening to admit this, but I’ve entered my seventh decade on this earth, and not only have I often made poor choices in love, but I’ve seen many others do the same. During the years that I practiced divorce law, I saw dozens of couples who had entered into unwise allegiances, including many who were confoundingly loath to let go. They paid enormous sums of money so that they could continue to fight, sometimes over such things as who would win custody of the good brownie pan or visitation schedules for dogs (and whether the dog bowls should travel along)

It all made me think. How do we choose our lovers? Our partners for life? What factors, what previous experiences, come into play? And why do women who are talented, intelligent and strong, who possess financial security and enviable careers, enter into relationships in which they are demeaned and sometimes even endangered? How many of us have seen our friends stepping into a bad situation and worried over what—if anything—to say, knowing our counsel is unwanted? And why oh why is it only in hindsight that we see people for who they really are?

My novel’s protagonist, Lily (who adopts the stage name Ruby when, at age 18, she heads to Las Vegas and becomes a showgirl), is strikingly beautiful. She’s bright and eager to contribute to a world that, in the late 1960s, is in the process of dramatic change. She’s been pummeled in early life; her family is killed in a car accident when she’s just 8 years old, and she’s forced to live with a stoic aunt and an uncle who sexually abuses her. Despite the brutality of her childhood, Ruby works hard and rises through the ranks until she is recognized for her talent and beauty as “Showgirl of the Year.” She can have her pick of any man—or men. And yet, Ruby falls for a man who, while gloriously handsome and sexy, also has a dark side. Ruby is the friend we’ve all had (or been): She is the friend we worry about and struggle to comprehend.

Countless factors shape our wants and needs in a partner. There is that make-or-break physical attraction, that chemical pull—because without it, we simply look the other way. Perhaps a person comes along at a time when we are particularly vulnerable, or when we have a compelling need that the person seems to meet. We see what we want or need to see. And what’s particularly interesting to me is that we let those initial, needful first impressions harden into a vision we come to believe is reality.

Maya Angelou has said, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” It’s a wonderfully true statement, and her wording is important. She doesn’t write, “When people tell you who they are”; she writes, instead, “show.” It’s an elegant variation on the truism, “Actions speak louder than words.” She also encourages us to avoid giving someone the benefit of the doubt dozens or hundreds of times over.

After completing All the Beautiful Girls, I came to the conclusion that what we must be careful about with love is what we tell ourselves. How often are we excusing behavior we’d never tolerate in a friend or acquaintance? What are we telling ourselves that justifies our staying in a relationship? Why are we working so very hard to justify poor behavior?

I think the most important thing I learned in writing this book is that just because I understand a behavior—why it might occur, what things might lead someone to be ferociously angry, cruel, cutting or simply careless—does not mean I have to tolerate the behavior. I wonder, though, if these are the kinds of lessons that can be learned in the abstract. Perhaps we first have to travel down the wrong road, trip and stumble, before we can find the right path to love.

Photo credit Anna Yarrow

Mary Bennet and Victor Frankenstein in love—shocking at first, but as author John Kessel reveals in Pride and Prometheus, it makes sense for these two outsiders to connect. Kessel, husband to novelist Therese Ann Fowler and the director of creative writing at North Carolina State University, shares a look behind his new book and how he combined two of our favorite classics.

I got the idea for Pride and Prometheus while sitting at the critique table of the 2005 Sycamore Hill Writers’ Conference, during my comments on Benjamin Rosenbaum’s wonderfully surreal deconstruction of Jane Austen in his story “Sense and Sensibility.” It hit me that Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein were published only a few years apart. Despite big differences in content and sensibility, the two books would have sat on the same bookshelves in 1818. Yet I had seldom heard them spoken of together.

This resulted in my bringing a story titled “Austenstein” (later Pride and Prometheus) to next summer’s conference. After my critique, fellow workshopper Karen Joy Fowler suggested to me that it should be a novel. I resisted. I did not think I could find a novel’s worth of story in Mary Bennet’s brief encounter with Victor Frankenstein and his Creature.

But 10 years later I returned to the idea, realizing that the novelette was only the middle of the story, and by starting earlier and carrying past the end, and adding the perspectives of Victor and his Creature, it would make a book.

Fusing the worlds of Austen and Shelley presented problems if I was not simply going to write some superficial parody. Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein are antithetical books. Austen maintains a cool distance from her characters; she treats them with irony and leavens even the most extreme situations with wry humor. There’s plenty of psychological distress, but for the most part, the most violent thing that happens in an Austen novel is an overheard conversation or someone getting caught out in the rain.

Frankenstein is full of histrionic excess, chases and murders: An artificial human is created from dead tissue, a child is strangled, a home is burned down in vengeance, a woman is hanged for a crime she did not commit, and a man chases a monster to the north pole. There are no jokes.

Frankenstein’s monster does not belong in a Regency drawing room. Mary Bennet does not belong in a 19th-century laboratory.

But the very challenge of mating these disparate tales made it a fascinating project, and the more I got into Shelley’s and Austen’s characters, the more interesting the project became. For one thing, making Mary Bennet the heroine meant I had to evolve her from the sententious, clueless girl she is in Pride and Prejudice. I set my story 13 years after the end of Austen’s novel, placing Mary on the verge of spinsterhood and allowing time for her to mature, to gain a little self-knowledge and sympathy.

It pleased me to tell what’s become of various characters from Austen in the decade after her novel ended. Of course writing sequels to Pride and Prejudice has become something of a cottage industry in recent years, but I hope I have provided as true a vision as they. So here are Kitty Bennet and Mr. Collins, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, Darcy and Elizabeth, Uncle and Aunt Gardiner, and even a servant or two, a little older and perhaps even, in some cases, a little wiser.

Moreover, since my novel occurs during the course of Frankenstein rather than after it is finished, I had to work my story into the gaps in Shelley’s. Pride and Prometheus grew into a secret history of Frankenstein, elaborating on events that occur in that book, adding new ones. What would the Creature think upon observing a ball in London society? How might Frankenstein converse with the Bennets at Darcy’s dinner table? My job with Victor and his Creature was to extend what we know of them from the novel, to go deeper into their characters, to explain some things that are left out and imagine why and how they do the things they do.

In the process I got to contrast the worlds of realism and the fantastic, the novel of manners and speculative fiction, the two kinds of stories to which I have devoted my career as a teacher and writer. It turns out that these distinct visions of the world have things to say to each another.

I hope the result is as thought provoking to read as it was to write.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Pride and Prometheus.

Photo credit John Pagliuca

Jess Montgomery takes readers into Appalachian history with her new novel, The Widows. But the characters behind this tale are more than fascinating—to Montgomery, they are healing.

A few months after our youngest child went off to college, I was at loose ends, partly from empty-nest syndrome but also because for months I’d been unmoored from any clear direction as a writer—a situation exacerbated if not triggered by a difficult situation in my family of origin on my mother’s side. With my mother’s passing, the situation was over but not resolved, at least not in my heart and not with a sense of peace.

So I was happy to distract myself by researching places to visit near Ohio University, situated in Athens County in the foothills of Appalachia, for our daughter’s birthday. We sent our children to college without automobiles, and she was, I knew, also at loose ends—in her case, for a chance to get out of town and hike. She was, after all, an Outdoor Recreation and Education major.

I started poking around on the internet with mundane search terms such as “places to visit near Athens, Ohio,” or “hiking in southeastern Ohio.” A tourism page popped up for Vinton County, which abuts Athens County to the southwest. And on that page was a celebration of a woman the county proclaimed as their most famous resident: Maude Collins, the state’s first female sheriff, in 1925. (The next female sheriff in the state, according to the website, was elected in 1976.)

I was captivated by the image of Maude: young, feminine, somber, strong, beautiful. Modestly and properly dressed in a jacket and ruffled blouse and sensible brimmed hat—clothes that don’t fit the clichéd sequined and feathered flapper image of 1920s women.

But there was something more about her expression—sorrow. A call to duty to go on, as if there’s no other choice. Maude’s sheriff husband, Fletcher, with whom she had five children and for whom she worked as jail matron, was killed in the line of duty while arresting a man for speeding. The story goes that after the funeral, Maude was packing up to head home to her parents in West Virginia when the county commissioners came to her door, asked, “Where you goin’, Maude?” and appointed her to fulfill her husband’s post.

In 1926, she was fully elected in her own right—in a landslide victory. She even gained a bit of national fame after solving a murder that was written up in Master Detective magazine.

But I was struck by more than fascination with a young woman in a law enforcement role that even today is unusual. I wondered what Maude might say to me about my own familial losses and sorrow.

I have no way to know, of course.

But inspired by Maude, my imagination offered up Lily Ross, a wholly crafted character in her own right and the protagonist of The Widows, in which her sheriff husband Daniel is murdered—in this case, by an unknown culprit.

I thought maybe, just maybe, writing about a woman working as a sheriff in a time when it was almost unheard of for women to operate outside the bounds of hearth and home, a woman dealing with complex grief and loss, would remoor me to a writing direction. A direction that might lead not only to a good story but also personal peace.

As the story emerged in my imagination, so did another character—Marvena Whitcomb, a longtime friend of Daniel’s, who has lost her common-law husband in a mining accident and who now works as a unionizer. Marvena becomes a surprising ally for Lily, and together the women work to uncover the identity and motivations of Daniel’s murderer.

Shaping both women are forces beyond their control—women’s rights, unionization, prohibition, coal mining. As well, both are formed, in part, by the hills and hollers, customs and attitudes of Appalachia.

I, too, am a child of Appalachia—both sides of my family of origin go as far back as anyone can trace in Eastern Kentucky. Though I grew up in a part of Ohio close to but geographically outside of Appalachia, the dynamics of growing up in an Appalachian family shaped me far more than actual location of birth.

And as I drew deeply from family lore, music, attitudes, recipes, music and language as threads that wove the backdrop of Lily and Marvena’s story, I found myself slowly starting to, if not fully heal, at least reach emotional resolution. More importantly, as Lily and Marvena uncover the truth of Daniel’s death, they find solace in relationships, friendships and community. Ultimately, I did, too.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a review of The Widows.