Introduction

2025 IPPY Awards Silver Medal Winner in Historical Fiction

2025 American Fiction Award finalist for Literary Fiction

A tale of faith, passion, idealism, and betrayal, perfect for book clubs, fans of Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention of Wings, and those fascinated by love triangles, contradictions between public images and private lives, and the limitations faced by women in the nineteenth century.

Elizabeth Tilton, a devout housewife, shares liberal ideals with her husband, Theodore Tilton, and their pastor and close friend Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, both influential reformers of the Reconstruction Era who promote suffrage for women and former slaves and advocate for the spiritual power of love rather than Calvinistic retribution.

Elizabeth is torn between admiration for her husband’s stand on women’s rights and resentment of his dominating ways at home. When Theodore justifies his extramarital affairs in terms of the free love doctrine that marriage should not restrict other genuine loves, she becomes closer to Henry, who admires her spiritual gifts—and eventually falls passionately in love with him.

Once passion for her pastor undermines the moral certainties of her generation, Elizabeth enters into uncharted emotional and ethical territory. Under what circumstances should she tell the truth? If she does, will she lose her children and her marriage? Will she destroy her own reputation and the career of the reverend who has done much good? Can a woman accustomed to following the leadership of men find her own path and define her own truth?

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Excerpt

January 1868

My steps feel light as I climb the stairs after bidding Theo good night. How good it is to feel a renewal of energy, my body once more returning to health. It is very cold upstairs, but I linger for a minute at the window. There is snow on the sill, and the pane feels like ice to my fingers. Outside the half-moon has broken through the clouds, illuminating the wintry landscape. The limbs of the dark trees are etched with glimmering white snow clinging to their branches. The neighbor’s windows still glow with a soft light, but I leave the candle next to my bed unlit so as to better enjoy the beauty of the night God has created. Mrs. Mitchell, the nurse, enters with my little Paul all bundled up.

“What are you doing, up and about, in such cold?” she scolds me. “Please put on something warmer and climb under the covers before you have a relapse, my lady.” Holding Paul with one arm, she expertly lights the candle on the nightstand with the other hand. “There, that’s much better.”

Obediently, after draping a heavy robe over my shoulders, I lie down and she hands me Paul to nurse. The baby and I snuggle together, warming up under the thick patchwork quilt. I look down at his small face so intent on eating. Such a healthy little chap! He already seems to be gaining weight. I doze while the baby sucks rhythmically. Mrs. Mitchell, who is leaning over the night table, asks whether she should snuff out the candle. Theodore’s tall, lanky figure is silhouetted in the doorway. Now fully awake I say, “No, leave it lit.” The nurse straightens up and retrieves the baby from my side. Murmuring good night to us, she quickly retires, taking the baby to her own room to sleep.

“Theo dear, I feel so much better, and Mrs. Mitchell is such a conscientious nurse, she takes such prodigious good care of me. The baby is so healthy, and it is wonderful that you can stay home for a while. I feel a woman blessed.”

Theodore sits down on the bed next to me, caresses my hair, and gives me a peremptory peck of a kiss. “It’s good to see you feeling better,” he says, but does not look directly at me. After a moment he rises from the bed and begins to pace the room, his head almost touching the beams of the low ceiling. In the dim candlelight, his face can be seen only intermittently, but his stride tells me of his agitation. I sit up in bed. He was so happy when the baby was born, but now he is sinking once again into one of his despairing moods.

“Theo, what is it? Is something wrong?”

Theo stops pacing and walks toward me, his shadow looming larger and larger until it covers the wall and half the ceiling. Abruptly, he crouches before me, reaching for my two hands.

“Everything is wrong. Oh, Lib, I am not the man you think. I strive to be unselfish, to love you and the children with a pure love, to defend what is honest and right.” His voice rises to a higher pitch. “My life is a lie. I am living one giant falsehood. I am not true to myself or to you.”

“But darling we all make mistakes, we are human—we can only try our best.” I stroke back the lock of hair that has fallen forward on his forehead.

He recoils from my touch. “Don’t give me platitudes about how God loves us in spite of our sins. I hate that sort of talk.”

It’s hard for me when he talks this way. Theo could be moody even in the early days of our marriage, but now the darkness comes welling up out of nowhere.

“Theo, darling, tell me what is bothering you.” My voice sounds high pitched and far away, the voice of a little girl.

He finally looks me full in the face. “I have been unfaithful. I have not kept my marriage vow.”

I say nothing. He stands up, looking down at me, waiting for my reaction. My face is averted, my eyes focused not on him but on his shadow once again looming large against the far wall. My only thought is to get out of the room. I try to swing my feet onto the floor, but my legs are wound up in the quilt. When my legs get untangled, they buckle beneath me and I have to clutch the headboard of the bed to keep from falling. My body sinks back onto the bed.

“Elizabeth, say something,” Theodore implores, but I cannot look at him, I am numb, no words come to me.

He resumes pacing. “It happened because there is no longer any real bond between us.”

“What?”

“There is no longer any spiritual affinity.”

“I don’t understand.”

“That’s just it. You don’t understand my work or my beliefs.”

How unfair he is! How can I be expected to follow him in all his intellectual wanderings when I have three children, now four with the baby?

“It’s your mother that drove us apart,” Theo continues. “Always criticizing me and my ideas.”

“I know Mother can be difficult.”

“Difficult? She is poisonous, trying to destroy our marriage so she can have her daughter all to herself.”

Mother did interfere too much when we lived with her to save money, but Theo remembers only the bad times, not the times when she treated him with affection and helped us through the illnesses of the children.

“But Theo, that’s why we moved to our own house, to have privacy.”

“She’s always coming over.”

“To help me with the children.”

“I don’t want to deprive them of their grandmother, but I hate it when she interferes. Why are my friends her business? She hates everyone in the movement for women’s right to vote, wants to keep her precious daughter limited to the Plymouth Church people. That’s why we’ve grown apart.”

“Theo, are you saying our marriage is a sham?”

“Not exactly a sham, no. But Elizabeth, you seem far away and I am very alone. Sometimes I want to find you, but you are not there.”

He says that I seem far away, but he’s the one who has become a stranger. His mood swings are more violent than ever. I tell him that all marriages have ups and downs. Neither of us should expect that we will always have the same blissful contentment of the early years.

Theodore shakes his head. “Lib, you don’t understand. I don’t want halfway love.”

As the meaning of his words sinks in, the void in the center of my stomach deepens and expands. Theo goes on, telling me how one of the new friends he met on lecture tour became something more. He does not use the words sex or lovemaking, but a vision of his carnal relations with the woman is clear in my eye. The treasured memory of my own first kiss, in the early days of our courtship, when Theo, with a frightened look on his face, crouched low so that his face came level with mine, and just barely brushed my lips, is obliterated by a mental image of my husband passionately joined in embrace with another woman, hungrily seeking her lips, her tongue.

The picture fades, leaving me drained and trembling, adrift in an alien room with unfamiliar furnishings. The flickering candle looks hazy through the film of my tears. I hear cries, but it is a moment before I realize that the sounds are from my own lips. Convulsive sobbing is shaking my whole body with a force beyond my control.

“Elizabeth, for God’s sake, stop! Oh my God, what have I done to you? Darling, control yourself. You are hysterical. I am sorry, please, please, think of the children. Tell me what to do. I will do anything you want.” He holds me, caresses me, but I thrust him from me.

There is a knock on the door and Theodore opens it. My sobs continue as though they have a life of their own, my whole body trembling, unresponsive to my will. He talks to the nurse, who assures him that everything will be all right. New mothers are very prone to emotional upsets. He should go and leave me to her capable hands. She tells him to reassure Bessie, who is very worried, and check that the children have not wakened. Theodore protests that he cannot leave me like this, but he goes. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the author:

1. What religious beliefs did Elizabeth share with Henry, and what emotional support did he provide that created a deep bond between them?

2. What aspects of her husband Theodore’s character did Elizabeth find admirable and what aspects alienated her affections?

3. What were the main concepts of the doctrine of Free Love espoused by Henry, Theodore and Elizabeth at some point in their lives?

4. How did the Free Love doctrine of the 19th century resemble the concept of Open Marriage advance in the second half of the 20th century and differ from the more recent concept of polyamory?

5. What role did the suffragist leaders, Susan B. Anthony and Victoria Woodhull, play in Elizabeth’s life? How did Elizabeth influence Anthony’s ideas about how to win support for women’s suffrage?

6. Why did Bessie give testimony at the trial that favored Elizabeth and hurt Theodore’s case?

7. Why did Elizabeth admit publicly that she had lived a lie for several years after the trial? Why did she refuse to see Theodore when he came to visit after her public admission that she lied?

8. How did Elizabeth reorder her social life and achieve financial independence?

9. Is the double standard as strong today as it was during Elizabeth’s lifetime? Are there any present-day social tendencies that could strengthen the double standard?

Weblinks

»	Author's website
»	Kirkus Review
»	Novels Alive blog book review
»	Author Q&A

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