“The best protection any woman can have … is courage.” —Elizabeth Cady Stanton
How often do we try to imagine ourselves in a situation where others were challenged by the fluctuations of life and somehow stood up to them? We ask, could I possibly have been as courageous as they were? Would I have fought as they did to get through each day with my values intact?
This is why most of us who write get such a thrill from it, but my latest historical novel has taken a new twist I wasn’t prepared for. It has two protagonists living one hundred years apart, with one finding she’s become so identified with the other that she starts living in the earlier era in her imagination and fears she’ll be trapped there forever.
It’s not a unique premise but isn’t one I’d ever written before. As my modern-day protagonist gets pulled deeper into the world of the early twentieth century she begins to understand what it was like to fight for recognition of women in world-class athletics of that era, and for an autonomous life in general. She thought she understood the protagonist of the earlier time, finding out almost too late that she had no idea. And as she became more entangled in the other character’s existence she feared she’d never escape, much as the woman from that earlier time had struggled to live for herself.
Come back when the novel is finished to find out if self-determination was likely or even possible under the constraints of early 1920’s America. What would you have done under the same limitations? I hope you’ll reserve your copy of the book that explores life in the early days of women’s world-class tennis when the men paid no attention, and the tournament promoters controlled the women on and off the courts. I hope it will expose you to a situation you never knew existed and one that introduces you to a whole new kind of courage.