​Why I Write
Recently I heard an interview with the author, Isabel Allende, in which she talked about her love of the writing process. So often writers speak of how difficult - even miserable - it can be. My own experience is more like Allende's. Yes, there are difficult, frustrating moments, and times when you want to push "delete" for the whole work. However, I have never felt dread when I sit down to write. Instead, my usual feeling is one of eagerness, even elation, at the prospect of several uninterrupted hours of writing, thinking, researching, and occasionally creating something I am happy with. Perhaps it is the ultimate self-indulgence of the introvert!
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Stony the Road We Trod is the fruit of close to ten years of research and writing, but its origins go back even further. Nearly forty years ago, my colleague at Wheeling University, Debra Beery Hull, and I wrote Loving and Working[1], a research-based study of the challenges for American women of combining a meaningful career with a healthy family life that included children. It was a challenge that each of us struggled with personally—both of us full-time academic professionals, married, with pre-school children at the time.
In addition to empirical research on professional women’s attitudes, we examined the history of women and work and looked at role models, from
biblical times to the present, of women who strove to combine a call to a public vocation and a commitment to a family or relational life.
Among those we studied were the Grimké sisters, Sarah and Angelina, the abolitionists and proto-feminists, from a slave-holding family in Charleston, SC. Fascinated especially by the struggles of their later domestic life, I vowed to return to their story when my own family and career life allowed for it.
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My goal has been to create an accessible story about this amazing family. There are already a number of excellent biographies available, but I wanted to bring their lives to a wider public audience in a more popular style. I was particularly inspired when I saw the film, Glory. Here was a compelling fictionalized history of the early Negro regiments of the Civil War – a story that I knew nothing about beforehand, and that greatly enriched my understanding of African American history.
When I began the research for this book, I knew almost nothing of Sarah and Angelina’s mixed-race nephews, the children of their brother, Henry, and his slave mistress[2], Nancy Weston. When I learned of their dramatic childhood stories—their enslavement and multiple escapes—and their illustrious adult careers as advocates for civil rights and women’s rights, I knew the story had to include them.
I will leave the reader to discover the themes of this book, but I will suggest here that there are several important themes interwoven. If it is a book about an unfinished historical and political struggle for human rights, it is also a book about domestic struggles, love and heartbreak, personal choices, and personal lives. In a way, it is a book about how these inevitably intersect. As a result, the story is told in two volumes, covering three generations of the Grimké and Weld families. I wrote it first as a series of screenplays and then decided to re-write it as a novel.
Writing Historical Fiction
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There is an immense reservoir of personal documents from the Grimke, Weld, and Stanley families including volumes of correspondence with each other and with many well-known names of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They also corresponded with lesser-known friends. Some of the main characters wrote personal diaries. There are newspaper articles about events in which they participated, numerous published works, and unpublished manuscripts from each of the main characters.
Although most are in collections at the Clements Library at University of Michigan or at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, there are other sources that are scattered in a variety of other archive collections. It would take many years to read all of it. I had to content myself with a significant sampling of these primary sources, focusing on important turning points and events in their lives. I fear I may have missed something important, but I am confident that what I have read provides a reasonably full account of their lives and personalities.
With a novel you never know. It’s patient and daily work, like embroidering a tapestry of many colors. You go slowly, you have a pattern in mind. But all of a sudden you turn it and realize that it’s something else. It’s a very fascinating experience because it has a life of its own.
Isabel Allende