I am a bookish lady whose lifelong love of novels of adventure and romance led me to write the Rebellion series of historical novels set in the American Civil War.
My interest in the Civil War dates back to seventh grade, when one of my middle-school’s history teachers gave his annual lecture on the battle of Gettysburg. Every year, all the seventh-grade history classes would crowd into his classroom to listen to the tragic story of North versus South with all its heroism and horror. The other teachers stood in the back and wiped tears from their eyes while he told us about the three-day battle that shaped the fate of the nation.
Recently, I came across the true stories of women who dressed as men to serve in the Union and Confederate armies. No one knows exactly how many of them there were, because they hid themselves so well. Some discovered and sent home. Some revealed themselves after the war was over. Many served in secret and kept the secret for the rest of their lives. Historians seem to agree that there were at least a couple of hundred women who took up arms and fought in the Civil War.
Those women were my inspiration for the Rebellion Series: women who rejected nineteenth-century society’s ideas of what a woman ought to be and do. Women who took their fates into their own hands. Women who refused to submit. Tom Clark/Sarah Winslow was such a woman. You will meet others in upcoming episodes of the Rebellion series.
