CLOAKED IN COURAGE

A portrait of a woman whose search for self-identity led her to disguise herself as a man to fight in the American Revolution.

Portraying Deborah Sampson as someone whose “spirit was always a little too large” (presumably to conform to gender expectations), Anderson follows her independent-minded subject from youthful chores in which she discovered “pieces of herself” to life as a “masterless woman” operating a loom in a public house, enlistment—after one false start under another name—as “Robert Shurtliff,” and military career. Despite being wounded in battle, she was able to conceal her sex until after the war, when she fell ill on duty…but thanks to a sympathetic doctor and commanding officer, rather than being forcibly ejected she was granted an honorable discharge. Her legacy as a feminist icon and the rest of her long life, which included lecture tours as well as marrying and raising a family, are left to a long afterword in which the author describes her own fruitless search through scanty primary and secondary sources for insight into Sampson’s character and motives. Lambelet likewise adds vignettes and larger scenes of a tall, generic figure working busily at various tasks or, switching from period dresses to breeches, marching and fighting redcoats along with a mix of light- and dark-skinned comrades. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

An admiring, if distant, feminist character study.