Patriot of the Lowcountry follows a young widow who navigates the British occupation of SC, gathering intelligence, evading raiders, and warning General Francis Marion, while asking, ” Who is the war actually for?” What first drew you to Eliza Wilkinson’s real letters and experiences?

My own genealogy research led me to a family tale about my sixth great-grandmother, Anna Asbury Stone. She made a dangerous, 200-mile journey from Virginia to Valley Forge in the winter of 1778 to bring supplies to her husband and brothers. Along the way, a congressman in York asked her to carry a letter to General Washington, and soon after she was underway the following day, a man blocked her way on the road and claimed the congressman had changed his mind and wanted the letter back. She did not believe him and hurried away, and managed to travel the remaining 80 miles and deliver the letter, and her supplies, safely.

This tale, untold outside the family and the DAR chapter named for Anna, was the perfect framework for a thrilling historical novel, and I used it to write Answering Liberty’s Call: Anna Stone’s Daring Ride to Valley Forge. After spending about three years on research and writing, I had a good grasp on daily life in the Revolutionary War era, and the desire to find other worthy women patriots and share their stories, too. Eliza was intriguing because her backstory was so poignant, and I had access to her thoughts and opinions in the 150 pages of letters she wrote to friends. Patriot of the Lowcountry was a completely different experience for me as an author. Without a linear story to flesh out, I pulled anecdotes from her letters and built them into the timeline of events leading up to and following the Fall of Charleston. I had very little information about her two husbands, so I built identities and personalities for them. Because Eliza had strong opinions about how men and women interacted and also what she wanted in a second husband, I decided her first marriage had either been very good, or very bad. I chose to give her a kind and loving first husband with a lighthearted nature that would have appealed to her as a teenage girl, knowing all the while that he would be taken from her in the first year of their marriage. That loss, and the loss of their baby, would cause profound change in her, so naturally a different kind of man would suit her better the second time around.

Eliza is proud, stubborn, brave, sometimes naïve, and always learning in real time. How much of that portrait came from the letters, and how much did you have to fill in through imagination?

Eliza was indeed brave, sometimes naive, and learning in real time, and I created her character based on what she wrote in her letters. The first six chapters rely heavily on her accounts of the British raids on her home and the Battle of Stono Ferry. The major difference is that in reporting the events a few years later, Eliza sometimes came across as brave and defiant one minute and then frightened the next. If I had transcribed those letters as written, her character would have suffered from the inconsistency. Many of her letters are undated, and it is unclear in which order they were written, so portraying her character as changeable as she appears in her narratives would have been unfair to her! 

The book keeps asking who gets to claim freedom and who is still denied it while centering women’s independence and slavery alongside the patriot cause. Was that always the heart of the novel, or did it deepen through the writing?

The comparison of women’s limited independence and slavery definitely deepened through the different drafts of the novel. My first editor pushed me to consider the disparity between how the British treated imprisoned officers and the enlisted men, and how it would make Eliza feel to see the officers throwing an Independence Day barbeque when her friends were starving on the prison ship.

I definitely wrestled with how to treat the enslaved characters in the story, knowing that Jefferson’s penultimate draft of the Declaration of Independence blamed King George III for bringing slavery to America’s shores, and the paragraph was stricken because it would not have been approved by the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia. 

To people in that time and place, slavery was a part of daily life. I could not ignore that her family owned slaves and stay true to the real Eliza, but neither could I paint my protagonist in a wholly unsympathetic light. There was evidence in her letters that she defended both her maid and a man the soldiers found spying on them as they traveled a lonely road (both of those anecdotes used in the book are taken from her letters), and so I introduced characters that would make her look at her world through different eyes. Especially after her journey to Charleston, I compared society’s expectations for Eliza’s life and her maid Jennie’s. I was glad the story arc allowed for Jennie to anticipate a greater measure of freedom in her future, even though it meant stripping Eliza of her most trusted friend and companion.

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