The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor

Sally Armstrong

Jul 2011 · Sold by Vintage Canada

About this ebook

Charlotte Taylor lived in the front row of history. In 1775, at the young age of twenty, she fled her English country house and boarded a ship to Jamaica with her lover, the family’s black butler. Soon after reaching shore, Charlotte’s lover died of yellow fever, leaving her alone and pregnant in Jamaica. In the sixty-six years that followed, she would find refuge with the Mi’kmaq of what is present-day New Brunswick, have three husbands, nine more children and a lifelong relationship with an aboriginal man. Using a seamless blend of fact and fiction, Charlotte Taylor's great-great-great-granddaughter, Sally Armstrong, reclaims the life of a dauntless and unusual woman and delivers living history with all the drama and sweep of a novel.

Excerpt from from The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor:

“Every summer of my youth, we would travel from the family cottage at Youghall Beach to visit my mother’s extended clan in Tabusintac near the Miramichi River. And at every gathering, just as much as there would be chickens to chase and newly cut hay to leap in, so there would be an ample serving of stories about Charlotte Taylor. . .

She was a woman with a “past.” The potboilers about her ran like serials from summer to summer, at weddings and funerals and whenever the clan came together. She wasn’t exactly presented as a gentlewoman, although it was said that she came from an aristocratic family in England. Nor was there much that seemed genteel about the person they always referred to as “old Charlotte.” Words like “lover” and “land grabber” drifted down from the supper table to where we kids sat on the floor. There were whoops of laughter at her indiscretions, followed by sideways glances at us. But for all the stories passed around, it was clear the family still had a powerful respect for a woman long dead. We owed our very existence to her, and the anecdotes the older generation told suggested that their own fortitude and guile were family traits passed down from the ancestral matriarch. For as long as I can remember, I’ve tried to imagine the real life Charlotte Taylor lived and, more, how she ever survived.”

About the author

SALLY ARMSTRONG has covered stories in zones of conflict all over the world as a journalist. From Bosnia and Somalia to Congo and Afghanistan, her eyewitness reports have earned her the Amnesty International Media Award four times over, as well as acclaim all over the world.

In addition to her journalism, Armstrong is the author of several books, including Veiled Threat: The Hidden Power of the Women of Afghanistan; The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor; Bitter Roots, Tender Shoots: The Uncertain Fate of Afghanistan’s Women; and her most recent title, Ascent of Women: A New Age is Dawning for Every Mother’s Daughter.

In 2017, Armstrong won, along with photographer/videographer Peter Bregg, her fourth Amnesty International Canada Media Award for their work in Iraq, as well as the Gold Award for Investigative Journalism at The Canadian Online Publishing Gala for their work about the Yazidis called Resisting Genocide.

In 2019, Armstrong delivered the renowned CBC Massey Lecture series, traveling across the country to discuss how improving the status of woman globally is crucial to our survival. The book version of her lectures, Power Shift: The Longest Revolution, is available now. In recognition of her work, Armstrong was promoted to Officer of the Order of Canada in 2019.

Armstrong is a former member of the International Women’s Commission at the UN, and is the recipient of ten honorary doctorate degrees. When not traveling to war zones, she lives part of each year in the quiet community of Bathurst, her childhood summer home, near the spot where Charlotte Taylor first set foot in New Brunswick.