Dutton
August 2016
On Sale: August 16, 2016
Featuring: Madame Jule; Mrs. Grant
432 pages ISBN: 1101983833 EAN: 9781101983836 Kindle: B00SA4ZU94 Trade Size / e-Book (reprint) Add to Wish List
The New York Times bestselling author of Mrs.
Lincoln's Dressmaker and Mrs. Lincoln's Rival
imagines the inner life of Julia Grant, beloved as a
Civil War general’s wife and the First Lady, yet who
grappled with a profound and complex relationship with the
slave who was her namesake—until she forged a proud identity
of her own.
In 1844, Missouri belle Julia Dent
met dazzling horseman Lieutenant Ulysses S Grant. Four years
passed before their parents permitted them to wed, and the
groom’s abolitionist family refused to attend the
ceremony.
Since childhood, Julia owned as a slave
another Julia, known as Jule. Jule guarded her mistress’s
closely held twin secrets: She had perilously poor vision
but was gifted with prophetic sight. So it was that Jule
became Julia’s eyes to the world.
And what a world it
was, marked by gathering clouds of war. The Grants vowed
never to be separated, but as Ulysses rose through the
ranks—becoming general in chief of the Union Army—so did the
stakes of their pact. During the war, Julia would travel,
often in the company of Jule and the four Grant children,
facing unreliable transportation and certain danger to be at
her husband’s side.
Yet Julia and Jule saw two
different wars. While Julia spoke out for women—Union and
Confederate—she continued to hold Jule as a slave behind
Union lines. Upon the signing of the Emancipation
Proclamation, Jule claimed her freedom and rose to
prominence as a businesswoman in her own right, taking the
honorary title Madame. The two women’s paths continued to
cross throughout the Grants’ White House years in
Washington, DC, and later in New York City, the site of
Grant’s Tomb.
Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule is
the first novel to chronicle this singular relationship,
bound by sight and shadow.
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