New novel by local author reveals secrets of famous suffragette

FALLBROOK – After six years of research and writing, local author Sarah Bates has published a new novel detailing the early life of suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Although the author has always been intrigued by Stanton, comments by young women who didn’t know who Stanton was, or that she fought for the 19th Amendment giving women voting rights, convinced Bates to write the novel. Thus was born "The Lost Diaries of Elizabeth Cady Stanton."

Although the author read everything she could find about Elizabeth Cady’s early years, it wasn’t until she interviewed Elisabeth Griffith who wrote a Stanton biography, that she found the hook for the novel. Griffith told Bates that Stanton had kept diaries all her life but when she became famous she read them again and, fearing they contained details that would ruin her reputation, she destroyed them. Stanton rewrote the missing pages that later became her own book, "Eighty Years and More, Reminiscences, 1815-1897."

Using the facts in those two books, Bates crafted a historical novel weaving fictitious scenes around real events resulting in a story that reveals Elizabeth Cady the girl, who would become the famous suffragette. Throughout the novel, diary pages containing her innermost thoughts depict the fight for equality Cady faced in the 1800s.

Bates' first novel "Twenty-One Steps of Courage" was published in 2012. Her short stories appeared in Bravura Literary Magazine, The Greenwich Village Literary Journal, and the anthology "Out of Our Minds, Wild Stories by Wild Women." She is a former writer for the Fallbrook/Bonsall Village News, and she tutored writing for the English Department of Palomar College for 10 years. She has been a Fallbrook resident since 1989.

"The Lost Diaries of Elizabeth Cady Stanton" is available in trade paperback and for e-readers at all retail booksellers.