Sophia’s War, just published, goes another way. Here all events, place, and most characters, are historically accurate. Even minor characters are real. BUT—the main character, Sophia (and her family), is a work of my imagination. That said, it is Sophia, who, if you will, causes the real events to happen. How can that be? In the celebrated case of Benedict Arnold and John André, though studied countless times by historians, there are some key events which happened but which have never fully been explained. Coincidence? Luck? The hand of Providence? Enter Sophia, and those events are explained in as exciting a way as I could write it. It is my attempt to give life to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion, “All history is biography.” Sophia’s War is real history, as lived by a real, fictitious person.

But Sophia herself, and her story, is very much fiction. How can the two connect? It is because as the historians of the events record, there are two key moments in the Arnold/André saga that have never been satisfactorily illuminated. Historians speak of “luck,” “fate,” and “coincidence.” Perhaps. But it is just at those points that I have been able to create a character, motive, and means, for these mysterious events to be explained. Not the least of what makes it all work is that Sophia does not want to be noticed, is not noticed, and indeed, cannot be noticed in the context of who and what she is—an independent young woman. It’s very much like that wonderful book title, Anonymous Was a Woman. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson said (if I have it right) “History is biography.” Sophia’s War is Sophia’s autobiography. Just don’t look for her in history books. You can only find her here. “The writer’s task,” as I once heard Paula Fox say, “is to imagine the truth.”