From the Author
Rachel's Passage is based on the concept of self-divorce.I was inspired to write this book when I discovered a fascinating historical circumstance. In the early 19th century, when our forefathers labored with the important business of establishing the first democratic nation the world had ever seen, one of the poorly-documented struggles that ordinary people faced was how to deal with marriages that were unsatisfactory. Since divorce required expensive and hard-won dispensations from both church and state, it was very rare. Much less rare were bad marriages. Drunkenness, cruelty, infidelity all existed, making divorce sometimes a necessity. So society found a way to handle the problem: self-divorce. In some places it was socially acceptable for unhappy couples to divorce themselves by simply announcing in public that they both agreed the marriage should end. They could then even remarry. However, the solution didn't always work. I discovered an actual legal case in which one party to a self-divorce changed his mind after eleven years and sued his happily remarried ex- wife (and now mother of two) for adultery (called "criminal conversation" back then) - and won! My novel - I call it an Intimate Historical - concerns a self-divorce: the heartbreaking reasons for its instigation, the dramatic complications that ensued, and the suit for adultery that climaxed the affair. Though my characters and their "criminal conversation" are completely fictional, the strange legal and historical background is absolutely true.
