There’s something about old letters that catches in your chest. Maybe it’s the way the ink fades, or how the paper feels brittle under your fingers. I remember holding one of my great-grandfather’s Civil War letters for the first time, folded thin, smelling faintly of smoke and time. It wasn’t just a piece of paper. It was a voice. A man’s voice, speaking across more than a century, trying to tell his wife he loved her, that he was cold, that he missed her, that he was afraid.
That moment changed everything for me.
When I set out to write The Virginia Governess, I didn’t start with a battle plan or a timeline of troop movements. I started with that letter. And with the quiet woman who waited for it, my great-grandmother, Charlotte “Lottie” Briggs Carson. She wasn’t a general. She didn’t lead armies. But she held a household together, raised children, taught lessons by lamplight, and kept faith alive when the world was tearing apart. Her story, and the stories of people like her, rarely make it into history books. But they’re the ones that shaped the everyday truth of the past.
I’ve always believed that real history isn’t only in the grand speeches or the turning points of war. It’s in the small things: a mother counting how many days since her husband’s last letter, a servant slipping a warm shawl over a child’s shoulders, a soldier writing “your devoted husband” with frozen fingers. These are the moments that history often skips over. But they matter. They’re human.
And that’s where historical fiction comes in, not to rewrite history, but to feel it.
Breathing Life Into the Gaps
Sometimes, all we have are fragments. A name in a ledger. A signature at the bottom of a letter. A mention in someone else’s diary: “Polly brought the tea,” or “Dock fixed the wagon wheel.” That’s it. No last words. No photograph. No chance to say, “I was here.”
But fiction lets us pause. Lets us ask: Who was Polly? What did she dream about when she lay down at night? What made Dock laugh? What kept him going when every day tested his strength?
In The Virginia Governess, characters like Dock and Polly aren’t extras. They’re people, fully alive, with memories, humor, pain, and hope. Their stories aren’t made up to entertain. They’re imagined with care, with respect, because silence doesn’t mean absence. Just because their voices weren’t recorded doesn’t mean they didn’t speak.
I didn’t invent them. I listened for them.
The Women Who Held the World Together
We hear a lot about the men who fought. And yes, their courage matters. But what about the women who stayed behind? The ones who woke up every morning not knowing if their husbands were alive, who rationed cornmeal and salt, who taught their children Latin while cannon fire echoed in the distance?
Charlotte, the “Virginia governess” of the title, is based on a real woman, educated, strong, quietly determined. She wasn’t a rebel. She wasn’t a spy. She was a wife, a teacher, a daughter, a sister. And in her own way, she was a warrior. Her battlefield was the home front: managing a plantation, raising children, writing letters that carried love and news across war-torn roads.
I wanted to honor that kind of strength, the kind that doesn’t wave a flag but keeps the lights on when the world goes dark.
Why Does This Still Matter?
You might wonder: Why dig into stories from 150 years ago? Why care about people whose names are nearly forgotten?
Because their lives echo in ours.
When I read about a mother worrying about her son at war, I think of mothers today, in Ukraine, in Gaza, in Sudan. When I write about a woman teaching math by candlelight because schoolbooks are scarce, I think of classrooms in places where education is still a risk. When I imagine an enslaved man watching the horizon, wondering if freedom is coming, I think of all the people still fighting for dignity.
History doesn’t stay in the past. It moves through us.
And when we give voice to those who were overlooked, the women, the servants, the poor, the silenced, we don’t just remember them. We make space for the quiet voices of today, too.
The Quiet Power of a Story
I don’t write historical fiction to escape the past. I write to face it.
To say: I see you. I hear you. You mattered.
That’s the gift of this genre. It doesn’t just tell us what happened. It helps us imagine what it felt like. It asks us to step into someone else’s shoes, someone whose name we might never have known, someone whose story was almost lost.
When I wrote Charlotte’s letters, I didn’t just copy old phrases. I tried to feel the weight of the quill in her hand, the worry in her heart, the way she’d pause to listen for a horse on the road. When I wrote Joseph’s letters from camp, I thought about the cold, the hunger, the way a man might clutch a scrap of paper like it was a lifeline.
Because love doesn’t vanish with time. Grief doesn’t fade just because the war ended. And courage? That’s timeless.
So maybe that’s why I write. Not to teach, not to preach, but to witness. To take those fragile pieces of the past and say: You were here. And you’re not forgotten.
And if, after reading the book, someone pauses, just for a second, and thinks about the people who came before them, the ones who lived and loved and suffered and hoped in ways history never wrote down… then I’ve done what I set out to do.
Because every forgotten voice deserves to be heard. Even if it takes a story to bring them back.
