"When biographer Amanda Vaill read Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton (2004), her first thought, she said in a recent interview, was "Oh! Somebody should write about Hamilton's wife and her sister! He's married to Eliza but seems to be attracted to Angelica!" But, Vaill added, "I was in the middle of a book of my own, so it wasn't going to be me.""
"By then Vaill, past recipient of a Guggenheim, Peabody, and Emmy for her work as a writer and documentary screenwriter, had completed the biography she'd been working on and was looking for her next project but hadn't found anything that compelled her. "I'm not interested in describing or exploring a subject," she says. "I'm interested in telling a story. And I wasn't in that theater for 20 minutes before I thought, Whoa! I need to check this out!""
Amanda Vaill noticed an overlooked narrative in the lives of the Schuyler sisters after reading Chernow's Alexander Hamilton and seeing Miranda's Hamilton off-Broadway. Vaill, an award-winning biographer and screenwriter, had finished a previous biography and sought a compelling new project. The musical's portrayal of Eliza, Hamilton, and Angelica as emotionally entangled prompted archival investigation into the sisters' backstory. A book contract followed before the musical reached Broadway and achieved major success. Anticipation of difficulty arose because women's history often requires hunting for scarce sources compared with the abundant records available for famous men.
Read at Slate Magazine
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