Author Tillie Walden spent over a year in the Henry Sheldon Museum Stewart-Swift Archives in Middlebury to research Charity and Sylvia, including reading hundreds of pages of Sylvia’s diaries, written in loopy 19th century cursive.
Walden also drew on Rachel Hope Cleves’s Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, which was published in 2014 and first unearthed the story of Charity and Sylvia from the museum’s archives.
In 2024, Vermont Humanities appointed Walden as our first “cartoonist in residence” and commissioned her to research a graphic novel based on Charity and Sylvia’s story. The goal was for the story to reach a wider audience, and to be accessible to the many middle and high schools who take part in Vermont Reads.
“I am fascinated by life in Vermont in the late 1700s and the 1800s,” said Walden. “I want the readers of this comic to feel like they understand a sense of how the days felt for these women. It is a story about queer love, it is a story about commitment and spirituality, but it is also a story of how we lived back then.”
The graphic novel was published by Drawn & Quarterly in Montreal, which specializes in comic books, graphic novels, and comic strip collections.
“Tillie’s work on the story of Charity and Sylvia is a deeply moving meditation on rural life, community, spirituality, and love,” commented Christopher Kaufman Ilstrup, Executive Director of Vermont Humanities. “I have been working with the Sheldon Museum to bring the story of these two women to a wider audience for a dozen years, and I can’t imagine a more moving culmination to that partnership than Tillie Walden’s masterwork.”
Recently, some questions have been raised about the relationship between Rachel Hope Cleves’s scholarly work and Tillie Walden’s graphic novel.
Vermont Humanities is delighted to have supported Tillie Walden and the Henry Sheldon Museum in bringing Charity and Sylvia’s story to a broad readership through an engaging and creative work of historical fiction.
For anyone who wants to learn more about these two extraordinary 19th century women, we highly recommend reading Cleves’s remarkable 2014 book, Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America.
We also suggest reading this statement by the Henry Sheldon Museum that reflects on how scholars, artists, and others use historic archives to illuminate our shared history.
Developed by Tillie Walden, and devoted to further elaboration on the pages of the graphic novel. Tillie writes, “Here you will find extensive ramblings on the history behind this comic.”
Visit CharityandSylvia.com
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We won a 2020 Schwartz Prize for best public humanities programming in the U.S. for Vermont Reads 2019: “March: Book One.”
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