that women’s achievements had been repeatedly erased through history.
Sarah and Angelina were born into the power and wealth of Charleston’s aristocracy, a social class that derived from English concepts of landed gentry. They were ladies of piety and gentility, who moved in the elite circles of society, and yet few nineteenth-century women ever “misbehaved” so thoroughly. They underwent a long, painful metamorphosis, breaking from their family, their religion, their homeland, and their traditions, becoming exiles and eventually pariahs in Charleston. Fifteen years before Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was wholly influenced by American Slavery As It Is, a pamphlet written by Sarah, Angelina, and Angelina’s husband, Theodore Weld, and published in 1839, the Grimké sisters were out crusading not only for the immediate emancipation of slaves, but for racial equality, an idea that was radical even among abolitionists. And ten years before the Seneca Falls Convention, initiated by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the Grimkés were fighting a bruising battle for women’s rights, taking the first blows of backlash.
As I read about the sisters, I was drawn more and more to Sarah and what she’d overcome. Before stepping onto the public stage, she experienced intense longings for a vocation, crushed hopes, betrayal, unrequited love, loneliness, self-doubt, ostracism, and suffocating silence. It seemed to me she had invented her wings not so much in spite of these things, but because of them. What compelled me as much as her life as a reformer was her life as a woman. How did she become who she was?
My aim was not to write a thinly fictionalized account of Sarah Grimké’s history, but a thickly imagined story inspired by her life. During my research, delving into diaries, letters, speeches, newspaper accounts, and Sarah’s own writing, as well as a huge amount of biographical material, I formed my own understanding of her desires, struggles, and motivations. The voice and inner life I’ve given Sarah are my own interpretation.
I’ve attempted to remain true to the broad historical contours of Sarah’s life. I’ve included in these pages most of her significant events and formative experiences, along with an enormous amount of factual detail. Occasionally I’ve used Sarah’s own words from her writings. Her letters in the novel, however, are my own invention.
The most expansive and notable way that I’ve diverged from Sarah’s record is through her imaginary relationship with the fictional character of Hetty Handful. From the moment I decided to write about Sarah Grimké, I felt compelled to also create the story of an enslaved character, giving her a life and a voice that could be entwined with Sarah’s. I felt I couldn’t write the novel otherwise, that both of their worlds would have to be represented here. Then I came upon a tantalizing detail. As a girl, Sarah was given a young slave named Hetty to be her waiting maid. According to Sarah, they became close. Defying the laws of South Carolina and her own jurist father who had helped to write those laws, Sarah taught Hetty to read, for which they were both severely punished. There, however, ends the short narrative of Hetty. Nothing further is known of her except that she died of an unspecified disease a short while later. I knew right away that hers was the other half of the story. I would try to bring Hetty to life again. I would imagine what might have been.
In addition, I’ve created and extrapolated numerous other events in Sarah’s life, grafting fiction onto truth in order to serve the story. It’s well-recorded, for example, that Sarah was a poor public speaker and struggled to express herself verbally, but there’s no indication she ever had a speech impediment, as I’ve portrayed. Sarah did return to Charleston in the months before the Denmark Vesey plot, as I’ve written, most likely trying to escape her feelings for Israel Morris, and while there, she made her anti-slavery views public, inciting confrontations, but her volatile encounter on the street with an officer of the South Carolina militia is all my doing. And while Sarah knew Lucretia Mott, attending the same Arch Street Meetinghouse and finding inspiration in Mott’s life as a Quaker minister, she never boarded in Mott’s house. The same is true of Sarah Mapps Douglass, who also attended Arch Street Meetinghouse. The two Sarahs became lasting friends, but Sarah and Angelina did not take refuge in Sarah Mapps’ attic after Angelina’s incendiary letter was published in The Liberator. No longer comfortable or