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A Nineteenth-Century Mother's Extraordinary Fight against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times
Grove Press
August 2010
On Sale: August 10, 2010
Featuring: Eunice Chapman
420 pages ISBN: 0802119468 EAN: 9780802119469 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
Ilyon Woo's "The Great Divorce" is the dramatic, richly
textured story of one of nineteenth-century America's most
infamous divorce cases, in which a young mother
single-handedly challenged her country's notions of women's
rights, family, and marriage itself. In 1814, Eunice Chapman came home to discover that her three
children had been carried off by her estranged husband. He
had taken them, she learned, to live among a celibate,
religious people known as the Shakers. Defying all
expectations, this famously petite and lovely woman mounted
an an epic campaign against her husband, the Shakers, and
the law. In its confrontation of some of the nation's most
fundamental debates--religious freedom, feminine virtue, the
sanctity of marriage--her case struck a nerve with an
uncertain new republic. And its culmination--in a stunning
legislative decision and a terrifying mob attack-- sent
shockwaves through the Shaker community and the nation beyond. With a novelist's eye and a historian's perspective, Woo
delivers the first full account of Eunice Chapman's
remarkable struggle. A moving story about the power of a
mother's love, "The Great Divorce" is also a memorable
portrait of a rousing challenge to the values of a young nation.
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