The Muse of the Revolution

The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation

By Nancy Rubin Stuart

 This commendable biopgrahy follows the life of New England patriot Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814), the celebrated -- and sometimes reviled  --writer of poems, plays, history and satire.  Drawing heavily on correspondence, as well as Warren's published wriitings, STuart traces her unusual education in provincial Massachusetts, loving marriage to James Warren, on-again off-again friendship with John and Abigail Adams, literary rise and ccontroversial antifederalist views after the Revolution.  Warren emerges as a fully fleshed-out woman with literary insecurities, intractable opinions and a high strung temper as well as deep affection for her husband and sons.  Stuart includes fascinating period details, focusing primarily on Warren's home-front experiences of rampant inflation, scarcity of goods, high taxes and profiteering during the Revolution as well as typical 18th- century illnesses and family anxieties.  Most poignantly, Stuart depicts Warren's loneliness and despair after the deaths of three of her five sons.  This account is valuable as an eyewitness play-by-play of the American Revolution and will be a great resource to scholars of women's and literary history. 

                                                        -- Publisher's Weekly,  May 5, 2008   

When John Adams observed that "History is not the province of the ladies," he had in mind his former protégé, the accomplished and prolific Mercy Otis Warren. Here Nancy Rubin Stuart restores Mrs. Warren to vibrant life, offering up a vivid picture of colonial America, and incidentally proving John Adams twice wrong.

--Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff and Author, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

"History," John Adams told Mercy Otis Warren, "is not the province of the ladies." Those, as Adams learned quickly were fighting words. This "Founding Mother" was ready to take on the "Founding Father." Unlike the more diplomatic Abigail, Warren took the direct approach. She relished hurling her verbal darts piercing male pomposity. Adams was her most celebrated target but others, including John Hancock, came to feel the prick of her barbs. No one has ever captured the spirit of this woman better than Stuart.

At last! A full biography of Mercy Otis Warren—poet, playwright, pamphleteer, scholar, agitator for liberty!  Nancy Rubin Stuart's feminist re-telling of America's "founding fathers" in revolution and nation-building is a wonderful corrective. This deeply researched, vigorously written portrait of the woman who chronicled the Revolution, improved the US constitution, campaigned for the Bill of Rights, and confronted her competitive, even malicious, male-controlled world with frequent success is stunning. Filled with surprises and important insights, both historical and contemporary, everybody concerned about our past, and our future, will want to read and gift this book.

--Blanche Wiesen Cook, University Distinguished Professor John Jay College & The Graduate Center, CUNY, Author, Eleanor Roosevelt, V. 1 & II, III

A fascinating reminder that the founding Fathers did not birth the Revolution by themselves, and that the ideals of independence resonated as strongly with American women as they did with American men. Warren’s History of the American Revolution is an invaluable insider’s view of the birth of our nation, but perhaps even more important today is her passionate support for the Bill of Rights. As Americans confront the issue of ever-increasing executive privilege, we would do well to remember that the individual freedoms we prize so highly were secured by patriots like Mercy Otis Warren.