This book started as a gift, grew to a dare, blossomed as a valentine, and became, in the end, a declaration of independence.

The Gift.
A dear friend of ours, the distinguished American historian, John Demos, was about to turn seventy. For his birthday, we decided to write something. A pair of eighteenth-century character sketches: a portrait painter and a fallen woman. Something we could write at night, at our kitchen tables, after we’d finished grading papers. After we’d folded the laundry and put away the pages of the other books we were writing. After we’d tucked our sons in bed and talked through the day with our husbands.

We took turns. We sent endless email.

Hey, I can’t get you chapter three till Friday. I’m teaching Thursday and the baby’s got some stomach thing.—jl.

Again with the stomach things! Here’s letter four; can you send ch. six by Monday? I’ve got a first-grade concert to go to on Tuesday. Plus, two dissertation defenses next week. btw: he’s got to fire the Goddards in the next twenty pages, else I will have to murder them.—JK.

          And then: Blindspot blindsided us, for ’twas naught but pleasure. A new world. So bloody far away. Yet so close, so close. Our characters and their world—that new world—seduced us.

I would fain write the Gazette tomorrow. Okay by you? Pray, have you any notion what Smibert charged for a half-length?—jl.

Fifty pounds, I hazard. Smibert was a wanker and a hack. Did you know Frances Reynolds painted Samuel Johnson? I am all astonishment. –JK.

          The story spilled into our days. Before we knew it, it wasn’t a present any more. The dear friend’s birthday came and went, and still Blindspot grew and grew.

The Dare.
About the history, we already knew most of what we needed to know. We had a lot to say about the eighteenth century—hadn’t we taught it, and written about it, and for four decades between us? How often had we lectured on the Founding Fathers, the Stamp Act, the Sons of Liberty? Stirring stuff. Truly. About the insightful portraits of Gilbert Stuart, or the literary virtues of Benjamin Franklin, don’t get us started. But where other historians reward Stuart’s vision and Franklin’s wit with worship, we would repay them with irreverence. Isn’t that—just maybe—what they would have wanted?

          Franklin was an American Swift. He loved: painting, music, plays, dirty jokes, puns, gossip, farting, flirting, and sex. He made his living printing the lowbrow literary fare of his age: travel narratives, pirate tales, riddle books, primers, romances, adventures. The novel, as a literary form, was born in the eighteenth century. America, and novels (which were then called “histories”), grew up together. Fielding, Richardson, Sterne: their works were devoured in the Colonies. The doorstop biographies and popular histories of the Founding Fathers ignore all of this stuff. Worse, they fail to tell readers very much at all about what academic historians have been researching in the archives for the last half century: the daily lives of ordinary people. The American Revolution took its light from their lives, not the other way around.

         There had to be a better way.

         What if we used eighteenth-century literary genres to tell the story of the coming of the Revolution?

         What if we wrote a farce—a picaresque, a gentleman’s adventure?

         What if we wrote a melodrama—a romance, a sentimental novel?

         What if we stirred in a little mystery, and added a touch of gothic?

         What if writing in these historical genres—and mixing them up—allowed us to tell a richer, funnier, sadder, sweeter, lustier story, but also, in some ways, a truer story — about all the things we had written about as historians: men and women, liberty and slavery, colonies and empire, honor and virtue, money and value, kindness and cruelty, arts and letters, politics and passion?

         What if literature could make better history?

         What the deuce. It was worth a try.

         We wrote and wrote, turn by turn. We got in the habit of leaving clues, dropping hints, and making dares.

Hey lady, look for a knife on the stand in the hall. kill someone? –JK
You make the currency act funny, and I’ll explain Hume. you on?–jl
Oops, gallagher forgot his red velvet sash. happy mother’s day.—JK

         Picking up each other’s dropped metaphors, and knitting them back into the narrative, became a kind of game. “The rise of the novel,” we had always learned—and taught our students—required “the invention of the author.” The novel is all about the individual; it celebrates individualism. Its author has to be a lonely genius.

         Who says? Couldn’t authorship be friendship?

         We egged each other on. We retold each other’s jokes, and tried to top them. We riddled our writing with historical and literary allusions, partly to see if we could sneak them past one another. We smuggled in William Bradstreet and William Shakespeare, John Milton and Charlotte Bronte, even Edgar Allen Poe. Wrong century? It’s fiction.

         We went to the Museum of Fine Arts, and, sitting in front of portraits by Copley and Blackburn on an S-shaped eighteenth-century couch, passed a laptop back and forth to write the scene where Jameson and Weston finish the Bradstreets’ likenesses. We went to the Pierce-Hichborn House (the inspiration for Jameson’s Queen Street lodgings) while one of our kids was at the Paul Revere House, next door, for a field trip. We went to London, and sat in the Kit-Kat Room at the National Portrait Gallery. And we took a train to Scotland, where we walked the dales and vales of Jamesons past.

The Valentine.
Eighteenth-century English genre fiction is all about what the author can make the Reader’s body do. Dear Reader, dear Reader, dear Reader, I promise: I will make you laugh; I will make you cry; I will make you retire to your bedroom in a fit of pain, or passion.

         Our first readers were our husbands. They laughed. Sweet Jesus, they laughed! Zounds, they cried!

         As the plot thickened, we came to see more clearly that Blindspot’s love story is, above all, about learning when to lean on someone, and when to stand on your own two feet. About when to be a colony, and when to rebel.

The Declaration of Independence.
We finished. And then we discovered we had created a fiction that wasn’t only fiction. It was history, too.

         A revolution — a turn away from our work as historians, that took us back to it.

         A different kind of history.

         Only when we read it did we discover:
         Blindspot was our own declaration of independence.

—The Authors