"Nancy Rubin Stuart, author of Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married—a dual biography of Lucy Flucker Knox and Peggy Shippen Arnold—draws these two women out of the footnotes of their husbands' lives and presents them as multi-dimensional characters in their own right, with admirable and condemnable qualities, mixed loyalties, and distinct, if convoluted, motivations. Stuart discussed her book this summer at the General Henry Knox Museum in Thomaston, Maine, in an event supported by the Maine Humanities Council.
In August of 1773, Lucy Flucker caught sight of an attractive young man drilling with the Boston Grenadier Corps. The man was Henry Knox, as Lucy discovered after tracking him to his bookstore in Boston's printing district. After that first meeting, the curvaceous brunette fell madly in love with the socially inferior bookseller involved with the Sons of Liberty, who made an utterly unsuitable mate in the opinion of her father, the Crown-appointed secretary of Massachusetts.
Lucy married "her Harry" anyway. Her parents left town on the day of her wedding; they then refused to respond to her subsequent letters. She lived an itinerant life far different from the one she was raised to expect, staying in army camps as often as her husband would let her, or living with friends, including Martha Washington, until the war's end…"
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