Much like A Midwife's Tale and The Unredeemed Captive, this novel is about power relationships in early American society, religion, and politics--with insights into the initial development and operation of government, the maintenance of social order, and the experiences of individual men and women.

Mary Beth Norton is Mary Donlon Alger, a professor of American history at Cornell University. She is the author of The British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774-1789 (1972); Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (1980); Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (1996), which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and (with five others) A People and a Nation (6th ed., 2001). She has also edited several works on women's history and served as the general editor of The AHA Guide to Historical Literature (3rd ed., 1995).