Leaving Everything Behind: The World of A Distance Measured
Imagine leaving your home, your country, and nearly everyone you've ever known, with no certainty that you'll ever see them again.
Now imagine making that decision in 1738.
There are no airplanes, telephones, or easy ways to communicate with the people you've left behind. A voyage across the Atlantic takes weeks, sometimes months, and even reaching your destination safely is far from guaranteed.
For many people traveling to colonial America, the journey represented an opportunity for a new life. For others, particularly those traveling under indenture, it meant years of obligation before they could begin to build a future of their own.
I've always had a particular love for colonial and eighteenth-century American history. I was raised by a college professor who taught U.S. history, so history and an interest in genealogy was very much a part of my life growing up. That early influence gave me a lasting fascination with the people who lived in America centuries ago, the challenges they faced, and what their everyday lives might have been like.
But there were also two literary influences that helped inspire this particular novel.
My absolute favorite novel of all time is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. I've always loved its Gothic atmosphere, its mysterious hero, and the secrets surrounding Thornfield Hall. There's something irresistible about a story in which the reader senses that something is terribly wrong, yet cannot quite understand what it is. And at the center of it all is an intelligent, independent woman trying to find her place in a world that offers her very few choices.
Another enormous influence was Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles. I loved the way Rice brought supernatural beings into richly imagined historical settings, giving them complicated personalities, long histories, and relationships that extended far beyond an ordinary human lifetime.
For years, I'd wanted to write a standalone novel that captured some of the Gothic mystery I loved so much in Jane Eyre, but with a supernatural twist. I wanted to create my own characters and historical setting, weaving an unexplained mystery into a story that otherwise felt grounded in the realities of its time.
That desire eventually became A Distance Measured.
The story begins with Elizabeth Hayward, a young woman from Bristol, England, who travels to Pennsylvania in 1738 under a four-year indenture.
Elizabeth is intelligent, educated, and knowledgeable about medicines, thanks to her upbringing as an apothecary's daughter. But those advantages don't change her legal position when she arrives in America.
Her future is largely controlled by the terms of her indenture.
When she enters the household of Henry Hannum, a wealthy and somewhat mysterious gentleman, she begins a life far different from the one she left behind.
Henry is a man of considerable means, but he lives with an unusual condition that has no obvious medical explanation. Elizabeth's knowledge of medicines makes her particularly curious about his health, and the longer she remains at Hannum House, the more she begins to suspect that his carefully guarded secrets may have an explanation beyond anything she has been taught to believe.
As their lives become increasingly connected, the story explores the differences between their worlds, the restrictions imposed by eighteenth-century society, and the choices people make when their hearts begin to lead them somewhere unexpected.
One of the things I love about historical fiction is the opportunity to imagine daily life in another century.
What did people eat? What medicines did they trust? How did women manage households, handle money, or find ways to exercise some independence within the limitations of their society?
Those details interest me every bit as much as the larger historical events.
In A Distance Measured, Elizabeth's knowledge of medicines and her ability to manage accounts and correspondence are important parts of who she is. She is a capable woman living in a time when capability didn't necessarily give a woman control over her own future.
But there's another side to this novel, one that takes the story beyond traditional historical fiction.
I've always been fascinated by the way supernatural folklore intersects with history. Before modern medicine, people had very different explanations for illnesses and physical conditions they couldn't understand. Some of those explanations grew into the legends and superstitions that have survived for centuries.
I wanted to explore what might happen when a practical, intelligent young woman encounters something that challenges everything she understands about the natural world.
Elizabeth is accustomed to looking for logical explanations. Henry Hannum presents a mystery that logic alone may be unable to solve.
The title, A Distance Measured, refers to more than the miles separating England from America.
There are distances created by social position, by secrets, by obligations, and by the things people are afraid to reveal.
Some are much harder to cross than an ocean.
If you enjoy richly detailed historical fiction with a supernatural twist, Gothic atmosphere, and a slowly developing love story, I hope you'll enjoy stepping back into eighteenth-century Pennsylvania with Elizabeth and Henry.
Available on Amazon:
Comments