I like to write outside, at a table on my front porch, or even in the hammock. Sometimes I sit on a park bench and scribble away while I watch the world around me. Once in a while, I stay in bed on a cold winter morning, with a hot water bottle, a cup of tea, and a notebook across my knees.
I am a professional writer. I write books for young readers and get paid for it. Occasionally I have a worrisome deadline or a computer glitch that causes a few stormy hours, but that’s as awful as my writing life gets. I am lucky to have a job that changes every time I turn a page, that allows me to read books, look at art, wander through the streets, travel afar, talk to and eavesdrop on people … all in the name of research.
Whether I’m writing a book of information, like this one, or making up a story with entirely fictional characters, part of every day is spent in research. Reading about one thing inevitably uncovers fascinating details about something else, and I love to follow where curiosity leads me.
This happened while I was working on a book called A Home for Foundlings, about a centuries-old institution in England that rescued hundreds of abandoned children. As I delved into that topic, I came across the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the ambassador to Turkey nearly three hundred years ago. In one of her many letters she described the common practice of inoculation against smallpox performed by the Turks. In England, where this dreadful disease was killing one person in six, Lady Mary’s observations were a crucial step toward ending the smallpox epidemic. The foundlings were used, with no ill effect, in medical experiments—the first recorded instance of what we now know as clinical trials—to help doctors determine the correct procedure and dosage to use on the general population.
As I learned and thought about Lady Mary’s life, I realized that there must be dozens of other women who had written letters, or travel journals, or essays, or diaries; women whose observations, like Lady Mary’s, had chronicled or changed the world around them, even in very small ways.
A quick search in the library and on the Internet told me there were not dozens, but thousands of women who had recorded their lives—joyful, challenging, illuminating, wearisome, and passionate—on countless pages, throughout history and around the world.
Limited by language, I looked only at texts written, or translated into, English. There were still more words written by women than I could read in a lifetime. The trouble was not where to begin but where to stop. Finally the list was narrowed to those whose stories made me catch my breath.
The physical act of writing intrigued me: where and when had these girls and women found time to put words down on paper? A few of my subjects depended on writing for part of their livelihood, but most of them had plenty else to consume their days, from waiting on royalty to surviving blizzards, stealing horses, delivering babies, visiting cannibal tribes, performing surgery in a war zone … and so much more.
In some cases, the discovery or preservation of a particular journal or manuscript is a key part of the tale. Today’s electronic correspondence is fast and convenient, but it leaves us with nothing to hold on to. Even if we are somehow able to read e-mails two or three hundred years from now, there will not be the tangible connection of fingering a lock of hair or a scrap of flannel pinned to the edge of a diary page, where every third or fourth word required the pen to be dipped again into the ink, or the pencil to be sharpened.
Most of “my” women would be surprised to find themselves inside a book. They might not be surprised, however, to know that the title began as a sneer, made by a famous male writer named Nathaniel Hawthorne in a letter to his publisher in 1855, where he complained about what he considered the irritating fad of “scribbling women.”
Everyone has trials and sorrows, and moments of boredom or immense delight. But these scribbling women wrote it down, passed it along, told us they were here, and took the time to illuminate their worlds.
For us, their grateful readers.