Tell It True
BIBLIOGRAPHY (READINGS THAT INSPIRED ME)
Bennett, Kelly Alexandra. Defending Home and Kingdom with “Indomitable Pluck”. The Experience of Loyalist Refugee Women in Upper Canada, 1770-1791. MA Thesis, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario Canada, (2006)
Brands, H.W., Our First Civil War. Anchor Books, New York, 2021.
Cain, Alexander. “The Loyalist Refugee Experience in Canada.” Journal of the American Revolution. January 26, 2015.
Lennox, Jeffers, North Of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the Long America Revolution. Yale University Press. 2022.
Lowe, A.R.M. “The United Empire Loyalists” Address delivered at the University of Delaware, 1960.
MacKinnon, Janice Potter, While Women Only Wept: Loyalist Refugee Women in Eastern Ontario. McGill & Queen’s University Press. Montreal and Kingston. 1993
Moore, Christopher, The Loyalists: Revolution, Exile , Settlement. McClelland & Stewart Inc., Toronto, ON. 1994.
Newman, Peter C., Hostages of Fortune: The United Empire Loyalists and The Making Of Canada. Simon & Schuster, Toronto Ontario, 2016.
Tillman, Kacy Dowd, Stripped and Script: Loyalist Women Writers of the American Revolution. University of Massachusetts Press, 2019.
INSPIRATION FOR TELL IT TRUE
Emmaline Cartwright took residence in my imagination about four years ago, and stayed there. She appeared, a history professor who teaches North American Colonial History and who has a preoccupation with the Loyalists who left America during and after the War of Independence.
Over the years, as a Canadian I’ve sustained an interest in the Loyalists’ history and, the path they took leaving America during and after the War of Independence. As a storyteller I found myself wondering about the wives and mothers who were part of the Loyalist movement. I began digging into the literature about those women, some who were left with their children to look after the farms and land in America, while their husbands trekked north to British North America, to Upper Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. I was drawn as well, to those women who left America without their husbands to travel North, some because their husbands had been arrested or killed as traitors to the cause of the war. However my character, Kate Robinson, a fictional Loyalist woman had reasons for leaving that were only hinted at in the literature. I wondered, were there Loyalist women who made their own decisions to go north to an apparent wilderness, take their children and establish a new life as head of the house?
Janice Potter Mackinnon’s book “While Women Only Wept” which uncovers the trials and struggles and often overlooked roles of Loyalist women, became a starting point, and where my imagination and the history began to merge.
Emmaline’s obsession with one particular Loyalist woman created a parallel time-line for me, of two women living in different eras. This is a story that reflects how Kate Robinson’s presence in 1791 regenerated the life of a history professor, Emmaline Cartwright in 2012.
“There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past,
even though we’d lived in different rooms.”
Angela Carter, “Wise Children.”