It's often occurred to me that writing A More Obedient Wife was the logical culmination of all the various things I've done in my life--although I certainly didn't plan it that way. I've been a writer, a lawyer, and a historian--and much of my professional life has revolved around the Supreme Court.
Education________________________________________________________________
I was born in 1955 in New York City, but moved to Baltimore when I was eight. There I attended The Bryn Mawr School for Girls, where I got a solid classical education, including Latin and ancient Greek--languages that came in handy when I was researching the 18th century, a time when classical allusions were fashionable. From there I went to Harvard College, graduating with a B.A. in English History and Literature in 1976.
Thinking that I might pursue an academic career as a historian, I got an M.A. in English history in 1977 from the University of Sussex in England (located close to Lewes, where James Iredell's brother Arthur lived). By the time I was done, though, I had decided to pursue my interest in journalism. I spent a year as a reporter for the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina (James and Hannah Iredell's home state), but ultimately I ended up doing what many of my generation did when in doubt: I went to law school, in my case at The University of Pennsylvania (a law school considered to have been founded by another of my main characters, James Wilson). I found law school far more interesting than I'd expected to, and ended up as editor-in-chief of the law review.
Work___________________________________________________________________
Being editor-in-chief of the Penn Law Review--and then clerking for a respected federal judge in Louisiana, Alvin Rubin--opened the door to the best job a newly minted lawyer can get: a Supreme Court clerkship. I was lucky enough to be hired by Justice Byron White as one of his four clerks for the 1984-85 term. Not only did I have the heady experience of being at the absolute center of the American judicial system, but I also met my husband, Jim Feldman, who was clerking for Justice William Brennan the same year.
The only problem with a Supreme Court clerkship is that it spoils you for almost any job that comes after it. I thought about teaching--I was still interested in history, and the idea of teaching legal history appealed to me--but I decided that I should gain some experience practicing law first. I got a job at a law firm but quickly realized that, much as I'd enjoyed law school and the experience of clerking, the practice of law was not for me: I lasted only eight months.
Luckily, the perfect job landed in my lap shortly thereafter: I became an associate editor of a project on the first ten years of the Supreme Court. Called The Documentary History of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1789-1800, and edited by Maeva Marcus, the project was intended to shed some light on a decade about which very little was known--the years before the great John Marshall became Chief Justice. The project ended up lasting 30 years and producing eight volumes of original documents relating to the Court in this period, along with painstaking annotations and essays explaining the documents and putting them in context. When I arrived in 1987, the staff was working on two volumes relating to circuit-riding: twice a year, the Justices were obliged to ride around the country holding circuit courts. From the beginning, the Justices found this aspect of their job a major inconvenience, and they complained about it frequently. But from my perspective, it was a blessing. While they were on circuit, the Justices wrote letters home describing their experiences, and reading these letters opened a fascinating window onto daily life in the 1790s. One Justice in particular, James Iredell, was an astoundingly prolific correspondent, sometimes writing to his wife, Hannah, more than once a day. Through his letters--and the few of hers that have survived--I became intrigued with their personalities, their lives and the dynamics of their marriage. A little later, I came across another interesting couple, Justice James Wilson and his much younger wife, also named Hannah. The story of Wilson's decline and fall--and the resulting plight of his wife--read like something out of a novel.
Writing_______________________________________________________________________________________________
After about seven years of working on the documentary history project, I decided to try my hand once again at non-academic writing. I started out writing feature articles for The Washington Post Magazine as a freelancer and then--discovering that I preferred writing to reporting--moved into writing essays that appeared in a number of publications, including The Gettysburg Review and The American Scholar. One of my essays--"Perfect," which appeared in the Summer 2005 issue of The Gettysburg Review--was listed as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2006. I also wrote two short stories that appeared in literary magazines.
But my short stories always came out too long, and a friend made an off-hand comment about how I should try writing a novel. It was at that point that I remembered the intertwined stories of the Iredells and the Wilsons, and particularly the stories of the two Hannahs. It had occurred to me to try to write something nonfictional about them, but there simply wasn't enough information available about the lives of the women--and, interesting as the Justices themselves were, it was the women's lives that I was really drawn to. So I decided to use the historical evidence as a jumping-off point, and fill in the gaps with my imagination. At some point I hit upon the idea of incorporating excerpts from actual letters to, from, and about my main characters into the narrative. I also realized that I was able to mimic an 18th-century voice well enough to fool a modern reader (an unintended by-product of the hours I'd spent reading 18th-century correspondence), which enabled me to write in the first person, alternating between the voices of the two Hannahs.
I was able to draw on the letters that had been collected and copied by the documentary history project--which the staff made available to me--and I also tracked down a few other letters I needed to flesh out the story. I also did quite a bit of research on various subjects that came up as I was writing--things like the procedure for inoculating people against smallpox before the invention of vaccination; what childbirth was like in the 18th century; the devastating yellow fever epidemic that occurred in Philadelphia in 1793; the Moravian community of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; and household hints and home remedies of the era. Including time spent both researching and writing, it took me about eight years to finish the book.
In 2004, after the bulk of the work on the novel was behind me, I returned to the Supreme Court documentary history project, which was then short-handed and in need of help to complete the eighth and final volume in the series. We finished our work at the end of 2006, and volume 8 appeared in March 2007.
Other Activities___________________________________________________________________________________________
I continue to write essays, and I teach workshops on essay writing at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland, not far from my house in Washington, DC, where I live with my husband and daughter (my son is a sophomore in college). As a volunteer, I also teach English as a Second Language at Language ETC in Washington, and I've recently begun a certificate program in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. My other volunteer job is as a reader for Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic of Washington DC.
I have just begun researching what may turn out to be another novel--again based on the life of a real woman, and again told in part through actual letters--but it's too soon to reveal any details!