This Is Not A Book Review, part 2

I've been keeping a list of all the books I've read this year, to see how many I could read, and remember what I've accomplished. It's a wonderful motivator, and so I'm currently up to 49. I'm in the middle of several books now in an attempt to reach 50 or more in a year. I'm going to post my list here on New Years, to share with the world!

The latest book I finished is The Spymistress by Jennifer Chiaverinim. It's about a spinster named Elizabeth Van Lew, in Richmond Virginia, who lives with her widowed mother, her brother and his wife and children. It starts at the beginning on the Civil War. She's a loyal Unionist, who's very upset about the split in her beloved country. When Union prisoners start flooding into the prisons near her, she finds ways to bring them food, medicine and books, and very carefully she becomes an in between for secret messages and letters. She helps prisoners escape and she has secret rooms built in her house to hide escapees. She finds and organizes other Richmond unionists into a network of spies, including a freed slave working as a maid in Jefferson Davis's office and the warden of one of the prisons.

 When I started reading it, I thought that it was a historical fiction, and Elizabeth was just a made-up character. And when you're reading like that, thinking that the main characters are made up it's not the easiest read. It's very factual, it's nearly a text book with a bit of dialogue and a few personal scenes to make everything read a bit smoother. Imagine my surprise when I finished it and read the credits pages and learned that Elizabeth Van Lew (great article about her!) was a real woman, and everything in the book was true! She was a real spy, and played a very important role in helping the Union win the war. She sent letters, written in invisible ink to General Grant, that you could only read after the paper had been washed in milk! She was a seriously amazing woman. She was hated by all her neighbors and had almost constant death threats and threats of her house being burned down. But she never gave up. After the war she was practically out of money, as she had spent all her personal money on buying food and supplies for the Union prisoners. When Grant became president he  remembered all she had done and to pay her back he made her the Postmaster in Richmond and she held that job the entire time he was in office. Sadly, she died poor and an outcast in 1900 in her 70s.

I was so excited when I learned she was real. I wasn't a huge fan of the book at first, but it becomes about ten times better once you know the truth. And it was even more exciting to realize how much I just learned about a time period I'm working hard to learn about, without knowing it! Women in history is pretty much my favorite thing, especially lady spies. And to make it even cooler, she started her network of spies as her own idea, with her own money, in her own home. She wasn't working for someone, or hired to do it. She was inspired to take as much action as a woman at this time in history could, just for her love of her country. I think that's really really cool.