The Story behind the Story

Blindspot is a twenty-first century novel in eighteenth-century garb. It plays with the conventions of eighteenth-century novels, newspapers, portraits, and histories. It’s dripping with history; in fact, it’s something closer to a mock eighteenth-century novel than to a modern work of historical fiction. This, inevitably, raises questions, especially because we are history professors and, in our historical work, writing and teaching, we’re sticklers for accuracy. Readers often ask us whether anything in Blindspot is true. People asked eighteenth-century novelists this question, too. Their answer? Yes and no. Novels look for a different kind of truth than history books, and Blindspot is a novel. Which is to say, we made it up. That was the whole point, and more than half the fun.

Blindspot is fiction. Still, it does rely on our work as historians, on every page. Much that happens in the novel is based on actual events and adapted from archival evidence chronicling both ordinary life and extraordinary transformations. The American Revolution. The Enlightenment. The eighteenth century’s bawdiness, its anticlericalism, its obsessions with wit and sham and rank and pleasure. A few of Blindspot’s characters were inspired by real people; many of its buildings are based on edifices that still stand; its portraits resemble paintings that now hang on the walls of museums. A sizable number of very short passages in the text are taken nearly verbatim from eighteenth-century letters, newspapers, account books, diaries, sermons, novels, poems, riddles, philosophical treatises, and legal records. We quoted, we borrowed, we took liberties. Above all, we invented.

This website should give you a sense of our sources. It is by no means an exhaustive inventory.

But dear Reader, be forewarned: there are spoilers here. Read the book first!

—The Authors