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Elizabeth Redeemed: From Historical Records to Historical Fiction

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While teaching a graduate seminar on US history, I became intrigued by the trial of Reverend Henry Ward Beecher for adultery with Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of his friend and protégé, the journalist Theodore Tilton. I remember telling my students that this trial caused as much sensation in 1875 as the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998 for the alleged cover-up of sexual intimacy with Monica Lewinsky. 

(Exploring the Concept of Regret and Redemption in Fiction.)

A student observed that there seemed to be more genuine affection between Elizabeth and Henry than between Bill and Monica. Someone else pointed out that neither woman seemed to want to push charges against her lover. I agreed. Ambitious male rivals of the reverend and the president pushed the cases forward. A young man said that both President Clinton and Reverend Beecher survived the scandal. Yeah, said a young woman, but what about Monica and Elizabeth?

This discussion with my students reverberated in my mind. I began to explore historical studies of the scandal as well as primary sources. I wrote an academic article on the impact of the gospel of love on the position of women in the Reconstruction era, as seen in the case of Elizabeth.

The sources revealed that there was deep affection among all three participants in the love triangle. Personal ties were strengthened by their involvement, in varying degrees, with reform movements to promote suffrage for women and freed slaves as well as the reinterpretation of the Calvinist religious heritage. Elizabeth was inspired by the gospel of love championed by Henry Ward Beecher, whose sermons spoke of God’s love and mercy rather than the Calvinist emphasis on punishment. Henry’s comparison of God’s love with the tender care of a mother inspired Elizabeth and helped her see the feminine role as crucial not only within the family unit but in building a better society.

I also examined the doctrine of free love, espoused by all three protagonists at crucial junctures in their lives. Advocates of free love did not promote promiscuity, but they did believe that marital ties should not inhibit other true loves. I questioned whether free love could be liberating at a time when women were still economically dependent on men, which made it difficult for them to insist that men grant their partners the same sexual freedom they claimed for themselves. 

Elizabeth had to contend not only with financial dependency, but also with an extremely puritanical Victorian moral code that frowned on female sexual expression. Once her husband publicly accused Reverend Beecher of adultery, she was forced to take a position that would harm one or the other of the two men she loved. Telling the truth about her relationship with Beecher would also mean facing the risk of losing her children and becoming a social outcast.

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Writing a historical study made me sensitive to the social issues involved in the story of the scandal. But I soon decided that the complexity of the feelings involved in this love triangle, and in the power struggles that led to public scandal, would be better served in a novel. Producing a work of fiction would require immersing myself once again in the historical sources, particularly personal letters, and records of the trial and the church investigation. This time I would not be looking primarily for social issues but rereading to become closer to the characters, submerging myself in their feelings and thoughts until they became personalities as familiar to me as my friends and family. I began imagining scenes in which the characters spoke to one another, bits of dialogue coming to me at odd hours.

I took random notes about the characters and their relationships, which I then organized under the name of each character. By this time, I had decided that the story would be told from the point of view of Elizabeth, the only one of the main characters who lacked a public platform and whose motivations were the most difficult to unravel. Some books about the scandal depict her as a weak personality, a woman who gave in to both her husband and her lover and couldn’t keep her story straight. My challenge as a writer was to bring to life my own vision of Elizabeth as a strong woman who struggled to overcome seemingly insuperable obstacles.

Once I decided that the novel would be written from Elizabeth’s perspective, I made a timeline with the most important events that impacted her life. Then I began to fit the scenes that were reverberating in my imagination into this timeline. The next stage was converting the timeline into an outline, a dated list of scenes with a paragraph or two describing what could be emphasized in each scene. 

When I began to write, I made a major modification to the outline. Instead of following a strictly chronological order, the story switches scenes from when Elizabeth is on her deathbed in 1897, and flashbacks (told in first person present tense) of the years of turmoil in her life in the 1860s and 1870s. At the beginning, I had difficulty fitting these scenes together, but gradually the structure began to flow naturally and seamlessly.

I was finally on my way, totally absorbed in writing Unruly Human Hearts, a novel about Elizabeth’s experience of love, loss, loyalty and betrayal, and her search to define her own truth.

Check out Barbara Southard’s Unruly Human Hearts here:

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