MARTHA BARRON BARRETT books: Invisible Lives, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; an historical novel, God’s Country; and Maggie’s Way, a successful novel sold world-wide.
Invisible Lives: The Truth about Millions of Women-Loving Women
William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1989 (hardcover edition)
Harper & Row Publishers (Perennial Library), 1990 (paperback edition)
“Every reader of Barrett’s notable book will sense the lifting of fog … take a deep breath—and rejoice.”
~ May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
The first book of its kind, Invisible Lives makes a lasting contribution to furthering the truth and lessening the fear about women who early or late discovered their capacity to enjoy erotic relations with other women. Lesbian, gay, bisexual—by whatever names women-loving women are known—the truth about their lives deserves to be told. Lively and provocative, Invisible Lives draws from more than 120 candid interviews with diverse women from Minnesota to Maryland, Atlanta to Albuquerque. The result is a revealing look at what it is like to be a lesbian in America today. Invisible Lives is written to appeal to and inform a wide audience. For parents, children, and friends, it offers a bridge to understanding. For lesbians, it is a confirmation and validation of their lives.
“Listen to the women of Invisible Lives. Their voices are decent, courageous, wry, defiant. They speak of pain and survival. Hear them and praise.”
~ Catherine R. Stimpson, Founder of Women’s Center at Bernard College, Chair National Council for Research on Women
God’s Country
Bantam Books, 1987.
This novel is based on my many great-grandmother’s gripping narrative of a journey with her family down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers during the Revolutionary War.
I was about fifteen when I discovered the thin, tattered booklet, An Interesting Narrative by Anne McMeans Jamison. Pittsburgh, July 23, 1824. Three cents per copy. I read Anne’s minister’s endorsement as to the booklet’s veracity, and then the solemn opening words: ”Sometime in the month of May in the year 1778 …”
Amazed, I read of Anne and her husband’s decision to load furniture, clothing, and their seven children—one an infant—onto a flatboat, so they could travel down the Ohio River and search for a new farm in Kentucky. I read of hard labor and hostile Indians; of Anne, after being driven from Ft. Jefferson, drifting down the Mississippi on a flatboat with fifteen starving children, the sole adult except for her hunger-crazed brother-in-law.
Years later, I began research to create the woman Anne might have been. The novel I crafted opens in 1752 with twelve-year-old Anne Aiken McKnight ‘s arrival in Philadelphia as an indentured servant. Her feisty, rough ways do not endear her to the strict Presbyterian family that buys her seven-year denture, and a romance with the teenage son fails. Her brilliant younger brother Hugh arrives from Belfast and begins to make a name for himself in Philadelphia political circles. Anne pushes west across the mountains to Fort Pitt, a frontier smoldering with hostile French and Indians. And her first love.
Maggie’s Way
New American Library (Signet) 1981.
“This is the story of the ’50s woman, the story of every woman who ever looked into a mirror and wondered what happened to her. … This novel opens more doors than [Marilyn French’s] The Women’s Room.”
They came to womanhood in the 1950s, when home, husband, and kids were all a girl could dream of. Now twenty years later, they and the dreams had changed. Maggie, the boldest, wildest of her college friends, first tried to do it the traditional way, then broke free to follow her desire for liberty and love to a point where she could lose as much as she gained.