Charlotte Taylor lived in the front row of history. In 1775, at the
young age of twenty, she fled her English country house and boarded a
ship to Jamaica with her lover, the family's black butler. Soon after
reaching shore, Charlotte's lover died of yellow fever, leaving her
alone and pregnant in Jamaica. In the sixty-six years that followed, she
would find refuge with the Mi'kmaq of what is present-day New Brunswick,
have three husbands, nine more children and a lifelong relationship with
an aboriginal man. Using a seamless blend of fact and fiction, Charlotte
Taylor's great-great-great-granddaughter, Sally Armstrong, reclaims the
life of a dauntless and unusual woman and delivers living history with
all the drama and sweep of a novel.
Excerpt from from The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor
"Every summer of my youth, we would travel from the family cottage at
Youghall Beach to visit my mother's extended clan in Tabusintac near the
Miramichi River. And at every gathering, just as much as there would be
chickens to chase and newly cut hay to leap in, so there would be an
ample serving of stories about Charlotte Taylor. . .
She was a woman with a "past." The potboilers about her ran like serials
from summer to summer, at weddings and funerals and whenever the clan
came together. She wasn't exactly presented as a gentlewoman, although
it was said that she came from an aristocratic family in England. Nor
was there much that seemed genteel about the person they always referred
to as "old Charlotte." Words like "lover" and "land grabber" drifted
down from the supper table to where we kids sat on the floor. There were
whoops of laughter at her indiscretions, followed by sideways glances at
us. But for all the stories passed around, it was clear the family still
had a powerful respect for a woman long dead. We owed our very existence
to her, and the anecdotes the older generation told suggested that their
own fortitude and guile were family traits passed down from the
ancestral matriarch. For as long as I can remember, I've tried to
imagine the real life Charlotte Taylor lived and, more, how she ever
survived."
