Beth's Reviews > Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married

Three and a half stars really for this very interesting double biography of the wives of Henry Knox and Benedict Arnold. I think it’s difficult to write a biography of women who weren’t entirely public figures themselves, and I learned many nice pieces of trivia and got a full and sympathetic image of both women and the families around them. I did think there were little errors and hiccups that made this a bit harder to enjoy. Some were small (as another reviewer pointed out, on the first page the author lists their birth years as being identical and then says one was four years older than the other) and some were just nitpicky on my part (she makes it sound like the Washingtons’ son who died after Yorktown was a child, while he was actually George’s 26 year old stepson). Mostly she used sources well, but sometimes the ellipses seemed to have eliminated words that made the syntax difficult to understand, and there were a LOT of names and places to keep track of. My biggest hesitation though was in her stated attempt to do some “both sides” work, to show that Peggy had good qualities and Lucy had flaws, regardless of what their husbands did. Which … fair. But she seemed very fixated on the fact that Lucy complained in her letters a lot about missing Henry, while Peggy really “grew up” and became stoic and resilient after her marriage and after Arnold died. To me that MIGHT be an indication of character … or it MIGHT be that one was married to a charming, cheerful, brilliant man she adored and the other was married to a guy who infuriated everyone he met, went overseas for years at a time, and left behind debts and a possible illegitimate son when he died. (Also, Lucy had 13 pregnancies and buried 10 children, so frankly it doesn’t bother me that she was sometimes snobby with the locals and liked to play cards … I say she gets a free pass for that stuff.) AND also, more than one person from the 20th century was referred to as an “Arnold apologist” who went around paying for memorial plaques and … yeah, sorry, no on that one too. An interesting and ultimately worthwhile snapshot of two interesting women and their families.