The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor (47 page)

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More on Charlotte Taylor by Sally Armstrong

The Look of the Book

More on Charlotte Taylor by Sally Armstrong

One of the things I learned after
The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor
was published is that book clubs ought to occupy some official status in this country—the keepers of the realm, perhaps. Maybe they should hold a collective seat in the Senate. They certainly are the sober second thinkers on literature published in Canada. Since the book has come out, I have been invited to spend many an evening filled with lively discussion, surprising analysis, fascinating deductions and usually delicious blueberry (or strawberry, saskatoon berry or rhubarb) pie that comes with coffee when the wine bottles are empty. I have had the pleasure of dissecting
The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor
with book clubs large and small, in places from downtown Toronto, to Burnt Church, New Brunswick, on the banks of the Miramichi. The questions the members asked, the threads they picked up in the book and the conclusions they drew made me wish I could write a sequel. The first question was usually a personal one. “What’s an investigative journalist who covers conflict in places like Afghanistan doing in New Brunswick chasing down the life of a woman who arrived there more than 230 years ago?” The short answer is—having a wonderful time. Doing the research for this book was a pleasure. There are no rocket-propelled grenades in New Brunswick and if there are warlords, I’m probably related to them.

Then there was the probe into what’s fact and what’s fiction in the narrative. Charlotte’s letters to the government come straight from the New Brunswick archives. The diary, alas, is my creation: what I imagined her thoughts might have been at the time. The assumptions I made where necessary in her story didn’t come from whole cloth. If the facts eluded me and I couldn’t discover what happened to Charlotte, I looked at what happened around her—the Miramichi Fire for example—and tried to imagine how those events would have affected her. But my goal in recreating this settler’s life was to take the reader to the front row of Canadian history and find out what it was really like to be a woman living the New World at that time.

In my research I found that much of the history of New Brunswick is written from a Loyalist point of view. The accounts often give short shrift to the contributions of the Mi’kmaq, the Acadians and the pre-Loyalists to that history. Charlotte was a pre-Loyalist. I believe she lived for a time with the Mi’kmaq. Her daughter married an Acadian. Of Charlotte’s three husbands, two were pre-Loyalists, one was a Loyalist. So I wanted to make Charlotte the vessel that heard all sides of the story.

Invariably, somewhere between the wine and the pie, there were questions about whether I was drawn to Charlotte because her story resonates with the articles I have written for over two decades about women who dared to take on the culture and religion of their time and seek emancipation. Pieces on the veiled woman in Afghanistan who thumbed their noses at the misogynist Taliban; on the entire village of women in Senegal who said, “Never again, not my daughter” and ended female genital mutilation; and on the women who wrote sections 15 and 28 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to attempt to ensure that the lives of women and girls would be fair and just.

Some years ago when I was returning to Canada from assignment, a stopover at London’s Heathrow airport included a lunch with an old friend. She asked how the assignment had gone and I replied in much breathless detail about the courageous woman I’d met and interviewed. My friend remarked, “I see you’ve collected another bead for your string.”

Indeed I’ve been very fortunate to meet and interview strong women who are making history and changing the lives of their sisters. These are the women who stir my soul and feed my appetite for changing the status of women and girls. They were very much on my mind while I waded through the research on Charlotte Taylor. Everything from her tenacity to her shenanigans made me think she was a woman born a couple of centuries ahead of her time, a woman many of us might want to be and only a few would dare to emulate. As it turns out, readers told me they were bound to Charlotte for the same reasons. One remarked, “She’s universal and timeless. She represents the struggles all women have.” Another said, “Every woman can relate to her—she’s a fighter, an immigrant, a tireless worker and best of all, a cheeky dame.” And still another commented, “She’s a woman who refuses to vaporize and gives you the courage to push on.”

Taking part in the rich conversations that have flowed out of Charlotte’s story tells me that she strikes a nerve with Canadians—our fascination with our roots; our pride in an unwavering pioneering ethic; the bold, dauntless and often tragic beginning of Canada. The reaction to the book makes it clear that Charlotte Taylor is not simply my great-great-great-grandmother. She’s everyone’s ancestor, as we all either have such a woman in our own family tree—or wish that we did.

And there are other threads woven throughout the story that made for intriguing book club discussions. Her relationship with Wioche was a hot topic. Was he the love of her life? And how about the nature of her alliances with John Blake, William Wishart and Philip Hierlihy? Were they merely providers and partners in the survival stakes, or did the rugged Blake, the gentle Wishart and the entrepreneurial but blustery Hierlihy each appeal to her in his own way? Those are conclusions I left up to them (and now leave up to you), but we all agreed that Charlotte was a woman of strength, passion and compassion who had an ample supply of spice in her life. For example, the book club members in Burnt Church told stories about Charlotte that had been passed down to them from their own ancestors, who had shared the river with Charlotte. One told a tale her grandmother often recounted: “By the time she was on her third husband, some women would follow Charlotte Taylor when she was out and about and wherever Charlotte walked, they would pour boiling water in her footsteps.”

The book club members wondered, as I did, why she didn’t go back to England, why she didn’t take advantage of the returning ships and face the consequences of being a runaway girl with child rather than struggling to survive against so many odds. The readers picked at the pieces of this discussion and came to the interesting conclusion that pioneers—whether east or west or in between—are people who somehow see far into the future when most can only focus on the present.

The strongest reaction to this novel was that Charlotte Taylor was the epitome of a woman that they longed to know. I know that I needed to know her, and from the people I’ve met who encountered her in these pages, it seems we all have a craving to hear stories like hers, which are scarce in our history, the stories of the wives and lovers of the men whose adventures fill our libraries.

She lingers with me.

THE LOOK OF THE BOOK

Have you ever wondered how a cover comes to look the way it does? Here, book designer Kelly Hill takes you behind the scenes of
The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor
.

The hardcover design needed to convey the rich historical context of the book and to entice the reader with a promise of the story of a remarkable woman. The design challenge was in the limited number of images that reference the Miramichi region in the late
1700
s, along with the fact that there is no visual record of Charlotte Taylor herself. So, I found a painting of a red-haired woman from the same period as Charlotte Taylor. And an etching from the archives of the New Brunswick Museum, View of Miramichi (
1760
), serves to represent the beauty and excitement of a unique time and place in Canadian history.

In contrast to a painting and an etching, which are typical to the historical genre, the paperback features a colourized photograph and band of birch bark. The three-part composition (woman/author/setting), is quite similar to the hardcover, but has a much more modern feel. Charlotte Taylor was ambitious, independent, and passionate—all qualities that resonate with contemporary women.