For 20 years, novelist Chris Bohjalian carried the seed of a true-life Civil War story in his imagination. The idea finally blossomed as Confederate statues came down in the South and America began yet another national reckoning on race.
“The Jackal’s Mistress” begins in Virginia with the battlefield injury of a Union soldier who, left for dead when his unit advances, is discovered in an abandoned house by the wife of a Confederate soldier. Carried to Libby Steadman’s home and hidden from bands of roaming Confederate marauders, Captain Weybridge slowly recovers and a friendship unfurls.
The novel is loosely based on the true story of Lt. Henry Bedell of Vermont and Bettie Van Metre, who struggled to run the family mill when her husband enlisted in the Confederate army and was captured and sent to a prison camp.
Bohjalian says that as he explored the Shenandoah Valley battlefields and spent time in Richmond, Va., “the novel grew real.”
