A Word From Our Sponsors (lol)
The Kindle version of EVEN WHEN YOU LIE is on sale through the entire month of December for $1.99 for US customers. If you buy it, please remember to leave a review!
I have complicated feelings towards Amazon, as I’m sure many of you do. On one hand, I adore the convenience, but I also love being able to walk into my favorite local bookstore and want to support them. At this price point, though, you can treat yourself to a little guilt-free convenience on your Kindle and if you love the book, by all means, order the paperback through your bookstore (if you haven’t already!).
The Misogyny, it burns….
I’m listening to THE MAKING OF BIBLICAL WOMANHOOD by Beth Allison Barr on my morning walks and last night I binge-read a histfic I was really looking forward to on the marriage of Sam Houston and Eliza Allen, so right now I’m pretty spun up on how little we know about women throughout history. This isn’t a new complaint of mine; I’m relatively sure I can trace the source of this aggravation back to my undergraduate days when I was researching witch-hunting in Tudor & Stuart England (sidebar: odd, isn’t it, how often this was charged against women of certain temperaments and economic classes, no?). It will shock no one, I’m sure, that in the early 2000s, the University of Texas at Tyler did NOT have great source material for medieval witchcraft or the penalties thereof; however, we know lots about Matthew Hopkins, the self-proclaimed Witchfinder General.
Throughout civilization, women have held lives—literally—in their hands, but we know so little about them unless they married well and provided children, were fortunate enough to be born into the ruling class, or were too notorious to ignore.
Which means Eliza Allen—despite being married to Sam Houston for eleven weeks—will remain a mystery. She at least had some agency in this, by requesting her papers to be burned after her death, and perhaps my interest in this is purely salacious; however, given that she left him and Sam Houston resigned the governorship of Tennessee, abandoned his reelection campaign, and fled to Arkansas, where he stayed inebriated to the point that he was referred to as “Big Drunk” even among the Cherokee, I can only imagine that this courtship and marriage had SOME impact on the man who would loom so much larger than life through Texas history. And yet, we only have his (very limited) correspondence, a few contemporary whispers about the scandal, and the historical record of their eventual divorce and remarriages.
All this to say that I’m grateful we’re becoming not only better about documenting women’s lives, but that we’re engaging with the historiography and the fiction in better ways and analyzing how they impact the world around them. One of my friends is currently finishing her draft of a histfic about Kitty Oppenheimer that I can’t wait to get my hands on, and I think we all know how much I adore Amina Akhtar, Paulette Kennedy, and Heather Levy, all of whom have upcoming fiction releases featuring women thrown into extraordinary situations.
But still if anyone has any good primary source material on Eliza Allen, let me know because I AM DYING to delve into it.
Upcoming
My writing bestie, Aurora Graves, will release the third book in her rock star horror romance series in late January and pre-orders are open
My dear friend, Olivia Blacke, is releasing the third book in her cozy mystery record shop series in March
(if I miss your upcoming release, please remind me! I’m happy to post about them!)
Pup Tax
Madame Swish Swish in a moment of repose while somehow still guarding the front door
