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From the time I was a little girl I remember hearing stories of Martha Carrier, my grandmother 9 generations back, who was hanged for a witch in Salem in 1692. My mother and grandmother spoke often of the history of the witch hysteria as well as the bravery and fortitude of Martha and her family (4 of Martha’s 5 children were imprisoned and compelled to testify against their mother). Not only did Martha profess her innocence, she was perhaps the only one of the so-called witches to confront her judges and accusers and cry “it is a shameful thing that you should mind these folk that are out of their wits.”

I spent five years researching “The Heretic’s Daughter”, reading transcripts of the trials, talking to historians and traveling through Massachusetts and Connecticut, collecting local lore. I wove as much historical fact as I could into the Carrier family legends to give the story an authentic feel. I read letters and sermons of the day to give the words a rhythm and cadence of the times, but tried to balance archaic speech with more modern usage so the language was not too cumbersome for the modern reader. The descriptive passages of time and place were important to give a sense of life in Colonial New England, and to me one of the most important elements was the dialogue. I used my grandfather, Hobart Carrier, as a model of a man reared to rural husbandry and who spoke with the deliberate slowness and careful speech of his forebears.

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Kathleen Kent is the author of  The Heretic’s Daughter  now available from Little Brown and Company.  See Kathleen talk more about the facts behind the book by catching her video on YouTube.

Posted by Deb in Guest Post |

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 8:23 am and is filed under Guest Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.