From award winning author, Sarah Bates, Johnstown, New York, 1823: It is a time when a wife’s dowry, even children, automatically becomes her husband’s property. Slavery is an economic advantage entrenched in America but rumblings of abolition abound. For Elizabeth Cady to confront this culture is unheard of, yet that is exactly what she does. Before she can become a leader of the women's rights movement and prominent abolitionist, she faces challenges fraught with disappointment. Her father admires her intellect but says a woman cannot aspire to the goals of men. Her sister’s husband becomes her champion–but secretly wants more. Religious fervor threatens to consume her. As she faces depression and despair, she records these struggles and other dark confidences in diaries. When she learns the journals might fall into the wrong hands and discredit her, she panics and rips out pages of entries that might destroy her hard-fought reputation. Relieved, she believes they are lost to history forever. But are they? Travel with Elizabeth into American history and discover a young woman truly ahead of her time.
~from back cover
When I mentioned to my mother that I was reading this book, her response was, "Elizabeth Cady Stanton... that name sounds familiar for some reason..." Many of you might be having a similar response to the title of this book. That might be because you might mostly know Stanton for being a bestie of suffragette bigwig Susan B. Anthony. Together, these two ladies (along with many, many others let's not forget) were a powerhouse team for getting the vote for women, though Stanton sadly did not live to see her work actually become law (Stanton played a pivotal part in the development of the 19th Amendment of the US Constitution, which gives women the right to vote, but it wasn't made law until after her death).... because this kind of stuff takes FOREVER to make happen sometimes! But like many historical notables, the woman Elizabeth gets pushed aside for the legend that's grown to near-mythic proportions.
What author Sarah Bates tries to do with The Lost Diaries is cut through all that and bring Elizabeth's story back down to earth. What might this person have been like as a everyday, living, breathing woman? To do that, Bates starts with illustrating the young and curious Elizabeth's earliest calls toward activism, which first budded with the realization that she would be denied opportunities granted to her brother, father, male cousins, etc. On top of that, it didn't take long for Elizabeth to join her father in his passionate pursuit of abolition. As Elizabeth writes in one of the fictional diary entries: "People with closed minds infuriate me."
Though her father encourages Elizabeth to pursue her reading interests, she soon discovers his reasoning behind it is much different from hers. While she hopes her educational pursuits will show her father she has just as much intellectual potential as her deceased brother (lost to illness, devastating Mr. & Mrs. Cady), she finds that her father's intent is actually to make Elizabeth that much more well rounded and appealing for an advantageous marriage. However, he does not want her SO well versed in what, in that time, was considered the topics of men, that she would be off-putting to potential suitors. While Elizabeth looks forward to one day having a mate that cherishes her mind as well as her social position and connections, her real drive lies in changing the laws that prohibit women and African Americans from having the same rights and privileges as white men.
Though she comes up against one roadblock after another, she will not be deterred. Elizabeth pushes and pushes until she convinces her father to allow her to not only complete high school but also attend a women's college. She fights to win his approval for her to marry a fellow abolitionist, even though Mr. Cady fears it will threaten his aspirations for political office. She refuses to allow anyone to send her out of a room where important topics are being discussed where her fragile, womanly ears and mind won't be able to comprehend. And through it all, she wins her way and grudgingly earns respect from her naysayers.
The Lost Diaries, through the route of historical fiction, chronicles this brave and brassy woman's life. Bates even goes so far to illustrate that Elizabeth sometimes even had to go up against her own husband, who would privately be all for her work but publicly would ask her to pull back! In this novel, we see young Elizabeth cross paths with other recognizable faces in history such as Frederick Douglass, Emerson, Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher (before she got the Stowe tacked on there) and, of course, Susan B. Anthony.
While this novel primarily covers Elizabeth Stanton's life during her teens - early to late 20s, it opens and closes with a sixty year old Stanton preparing for a suffrage speech, looking over pivotal moments of her life up to that point. Everything is chronicled in a diary (though this is not an epistolary novel) but in the earliest pages of the story the reader witnesses elderly Elizabeth removing and burning the most damning pages of her chronicled life, not wanting those bits of truth to tarnish the version of her life she prefers to preserve. So in the process we are let in on what this fictional version of Stanton may have been reluctant to have known... such as the temptation of romantic attentions from her sister's husband, her drive for serious education which made it difficult for her to develop friendships with more frivolously natured women, or her lifelong struggle with bouts of deep depression and self-doubt.
I found Bates' writing to have a similar sort of banter to that found in one of Jane Austen's novels as well as the coziness of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. I also liked that parts of the novel featured a more realistic view of rail and waterway travel, which is commonly romanticized. Elizabeth writes in her diary of the stench of passengers, the crowded cars in nearly any part of a train or boat, the sheer loudness of everything from the people to the machines themselves. I also found much I could relate to in this version of Stanton -- such as her insistence that the word "obey" be removed from her marriage vows, which is something I did with my own vows :-)
My small disappointments with a couple of things. For one, the plot was a little slower than I typically enjoy. Not terribly so, but enough to where I noticed myself mentally wishing it would "pick up already". Secondly, considering the title, I was disappointed to see the diary not play a more important role in the story. The passages were incredibly brief, nearly always at the end of a chapter and pretty much only recapped what I had just read in that chapter. The rest of the book is straight up historical fiction novelization.
My minor disappointments aside, this was still a great bit of historical fiction that did have me pondering what a young Elizabeth Cady Stanton might have been like versus the older figure we are commonly taught about in today's history classes. In her own words, author Sarah Bates reveals her inspiration for this work as stemming from this thought: "The lost diaries may have existed in some form because according to Griffith (Stanton biographer Elisabeth Griffith), Mrs. Stanton did not like the way her first memoir portrayed her life so she destroyed it and replaced it with Eighty Years and More. Regardless of fact or fiction, the intent of this novel is to honor Elizabeth Cady Stanton and reveal how the efforts of one woman changed history through the way she lived: not a mythical heroine, but a real live girl."
FTC Disclaimer: VirtualAuthorBookTours.com kindly provided me with a complimentary copy of this book with a request that I might check it out and share my thoughts. The opinions above are entirely my own.
above: author Sarah Bates
My thanks to Virtual Blog Tours for inviting me to be a part of this novel’s
blog tour program!
BONUS MATERIAL:
Additionally, if you have a young reader you would like to introduce to the life story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, be sure to check out the graphic novel, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Women's Rights Pioneer by Connie Colwell Miller, illustrated by Cynthia Martin & Keith Tucker.
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