I could go on and on, comparing each incident in the book with its antecedent in real life, but then this historical note would be as long as the book. I have never had the privilege of dealing with as rich a source of anecdote as the chatty, snarky, fascinating letters written home by the members of the Smith College Relief Unit. My only regret was that I couldn’t include even more of their adventures and mishaps in the book. There were times when I was highly tempted to abandon the whole project and put together an annotated version of their letters instead, because the truth was even more incredible than fiction. The letter excerpts at the start of each chapter, some very closely paraphrased from actual letters, are my nod to the amazing corpus of material left by the real members of the Smith College Relief Unit.
However, since I did go on with the novel, this is where the book departs from the historical record: the events are real, but all the women in this novel are fictional. Some are more fictional than others. Some, like Kate and Emmie, were entirely the product of my imagination; others were more or less closely inspired by the characters of the actual members of the Unit as they conveyed themselves to me from their personal letters.
Mrs. Rutherford is based—with some fictional flourishes—on Harriet Boyd Hawes, the real founder of the Smith Unit, a pioneering archaeologist and war nurse who once forgot her baby in a stationery shop in Northampton. Dr. Stringfellow was a stand-in for the amazing Alice Weld Tallant, who did have really quite dramatic eyebrows, but was not, in fact, Mrs. Hawes’s college roommate or even her same class year. Nell Baldwin, the Unit’s librarian, was inspired by the letters of Alice Leavens, who wrote movingly of begging for books for the children. Florence Lewes was my answer to Frances Valentine, the Unit’s agriculturalist, who, like my imaginary replacement, wasn’t able to arrive until November （and wrote home about how it was much warmer not to attempt to wash）。 Liza Shaw was inspired in part by Catherine Hooper, who wrote home so feelingly about food—and who did such a marvelous job with the traveling store.
My two heroines, Emmie Van Alden and Kate Moran, and Emmie’s cousin, Julia Pruyn, are really quite genuinely fictional, although the inspiration for Kate did come from two real members of the Unit. When I first read Ruth Gaines’s memoirs, I was struck by the subtle difference in attitude toward Maud Kelly, the Unit’s junior doctor, the only Catholic member of the Unit. The underlying vein of anti-Catholic sentiment came out even more strongly in some of the private letters of a handful of the Unit members. Looking into the history of Smith College, I was struck by the fact that the number of Catholic students in any given class at the turn of the century was in the single digits. What would life have been like for a Catholic student at Smith? Or after?
The other inspiration for Kate was Marie Wolfs, ’08, a Smith grad whose home is listed as Newark, New Jersey, but who was of Belgian parentage and was in Lieges when the war broke out. Marie’s letters are just as colloquial and “Smithie” as the rest of the women’s, but she is frequently referred to in both articles and the private letters as a Belgian refugee or that Belgian girl, something that sets her apart from the others, even though she got along with everyone and seems to have neatly avoided factions and feuds. Like my fictional Kate, Marie Wolfs was appointed assistant director of the Unit and wound up in charge of the evacuation as their director, Mrs. Andrews, had been summoned to Paris for the week for meetings with the Red Cross. Like Kate, Marie Wolfs returned to France as director of the Unit after the war to oversee the rebuilding of their villages.
Emmie was inspired by the many references in the women’s letters to both the suffrage movement—the winning of the vote for women in New York was something that was followed by the members of the Unit with great interest, and the New Yorkers in the group crowed mercilessly over their less fortunate companions—and their background in settlement house work, which deeply informed the whole structure and nature of the Unit. Briefly put, the settlement house movement was a charitable initiative in which upper-middle-class women would move into an underserved urban neighborhood and provide services and educational opportunities—much as the Unit did in their villages in France. It also provided an outlet for the talents of educated women at a time when work outside the home was not yet the norm for women of means. Many of the real members of the Unit had a settlement house background. There is a score of books on the settlement house movement, including Domenica Barbuto’s American Settlement Houses and Progressive Social Reform and Harry Kraus’s The Settlement House Movement in New York City: 1886–1914.