Mingling Souls Upon Paper with Bonnie Hurd Smith

LIVE: THURSDAY, 16 May 2013 at 1:00pm EST This week on Fieldstone Common, Marian Pierre-Louis interviews Bonnie Hurd Smith, author of Mingling Souls Upon Paper: An 18th-Century Love Story. Mingling Souls Upon Paper details the 18th-century love story of Judith Sargent Stevens and John Murray. While few of Johns personal letters are known to exist, Judith hand-copied approximately 5,000 of her letters into twenty letter books that were discovered in the library of a former Mississippi plantation. The letters in Mingling Souls Upon Paper are Judiths words. They trace her fourteen-year friendship with John, their controversial twenty-seven-year marriage, and their lives together as husband and wife when John was the "choice of her heart" and she was his "ever devoted wife." They chronicle Judiths blossoming career as the most important female essayist in eighteenth-century America, and Johns as the founder of organized American Universalism. Finally, they record Johns debilitating illness and death, and Judiths final days without him. All together, the letters cover forty-four years of personal and public lives. Through Judith Sargent Murrays letters, Bonnie Hurd Smith, herself a distant cousin of Judiths, skillfully brings to life two extraordinary eighteenth-century individuals whose love story is timeless. Bonnie Hurd Smith has been writing and speaking about womens history for twenty years, and she is known as a passionate and tireless promoter of womens history and how it can serve as a source of pride and inspiration for girls, young women, and women. For more details and upcoming schedule see: http://FieldstoneCommon.blogspot.com

History