Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People
What Is Otherwise Infinite

Charity and Sylvia

An openly Lesbian couple survives and thrives in 19th century Vermont–a true story, as told by Tillie Walden

The month is February in the year 1807. The place is Weybridge, Vermont: small, cold, lonely, and beautiful. Sylvia Drake is exhausted. As an unwed woman with few prospects, she is residing with and caring for her sister’s rambunctious family. Today the house is abuzz awaiting a guest—Charity Bryant. A friend of the family, she is most known for her elegant letters, with their swoopy and evocative penmanship and carefully chosen prose. But Charity’s visit is a guise, she is coming to Vermont to start over after heartbreak and rumours—so many rumours—that have grown too loud back in Massachusetts.

Being openly gay in 19th century New England is not an easy row to hoe. But Charity can only be herself, and she immediately catches—and holds—the eye of none other than Sylvia Drake. From this point on, for 44 years, the two would be inseparable, building a life together despite all odds and living as a lesbian couple in small town Vermont.

The true, exceptional story of these remarkable women is brought to life with humor and passion by the unparalleled and award-winning Tillie Walden (Spinning, On A Sunbeam). We see America grow alongside these women over a period that brings about the railroad, many novels, 14 Presidents, riots, rebellion, plagues, and poetry. Based on extensive archives of their writing, Charity and Sylvia is a groundbreaking biography that is also the story of 19th century America.

More Adult, Non-Juvenile Books

  • When he was a homesteader in Alaska, poet John Haines moved away from language and institutions to an older and simpler existence.

  • Journey to the dusty little town of Lonesome Dove, where retired Texas Rangers Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call undertake a perilous cattle drive to the untamed plains of Montana.

  • Discover this transcendent middle grade masterpiece about a young black boy whose quiet rural live in the Appalachian Mountains begins to change—winner of the Newbery Medal, the National Book Award, and the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award. Mayo Cornelius Higgins sits on his gleaming, forty-foot steel pole, towering over his home on Sarah’s Mountain. Stretched before him are rolling hills and shady valleys. But behind him lie the wounds of strip mining, including a mountain of rubble that may one day fall and bury his home. M.C. dreams of escape for himself and his family. And, one day, atop his pole, he [...]