Virginia Scharff

Virginia Scharff is a colorful author of character-driven novels who has written four Wyoming pop-culture mysteries under the name of Virginia Swift. She strives to do likewise in her five academic and historic books, the newest being The Women Jefferson Loved (496 pages, hardcover, $27.99; HarperCollins, 2010). Now, this University of New Mexico history professor fills Wolf Schneider in on what love has to do with the third President of the United States.

Q: You came to Albuquerque for the job at UNM 21 years ago, and you stay because . . . ?

Having lived in Wyoming winters and Arizona summers, I was really glad to land in New Mexico—it takes the edge off the cold and heat. Albuquerque has a multicultural sensibility that appeals to me. I’ve had an organic garden since I’ve been here, and I’m a gardener from way back.

When you decided to write about Thomas Jefferson, were you thinking about David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of John Adams and its success as a TV miniseries?

Yeah! I thought the miniseries was wonderful. As I was writing this book, I thought every one of these women could easily be two hours of television. This is a fresh take on Jefferson: You really get a very different picture of Jefferson when you see him in relationship with the women he loved.

Would you say this is a feminist history?

If thinking seriously about women as if their own lives mattered—rather than as appendages or accessories to great men—is a feminist idea, it’s definitely a feminist book.

What do you think of Jefferson’s wife, Martha, on her deathbed asking Jefferson to never marry again?

That is one of the most interesting moments in his life. She’s reacting against having had stepmothers of her own, and she’s trying to protect her three daughters. She did it so her daughters wouldn’t be neglected or disinherited by a stepmother.

Jefferson’s most provocative love affair after Martha’s death was with his 30-years-younger black slave, Sarah “Sally” Hemings—who was half-sister to his late wife, right?

Yeah. Certainly Sally would be considered “black” in a binary sort of black-white racial order, but this is a person who had one African grandparent and three English grandparents. She was described as mighty near white, with long, straight hair. This was somebody who reminded him every day that the bonds of slavery reached into the most intimate places, and he honored his promise to her to see all of their children freed. And she sure as heck kept her promises to him: that she would be as unobtrusive as possible, and stay where he wanted her to be.

How many children do you believe Jefferson had with Sally?

She probably was pregnant seven times. Four of her children lived to adulthood. It is my assumption that they were all the children of Thomas Jefferson.

Where did you do your research, and did you do it all yourself?

I did every scrap of this research myself! I did it at the Library of Congress, Monticello, Huntington Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, Paris, and Milan. Now Monticello has Jefferson’s family’s letters online.

What does your book reveal about Jefferson that hadn’t been known before?

It shows the way his ideal of domestic society¾basically like a private patriarchy¾shaped his public actions right into the Declaration of Independence and the Louisiana Purchase. We see why he was so passionately devoted to causes like American independence, and the idea that a man ought to be free to pursue his own happiness and livelihood, and protect and provide for and love his family.

Did you look for two sources for every fact, or was one enough?

Sometimes one is enough, when it’s in relation to other things. For example, the most important sources about Sally Hemings’s relationship with Thomas Jefferson were articles based on oral interviews with her son, Madison Hemings, and him saying, “This is my dad.” Now there is DNA evidence linking a Jefferson male to Madison Hemings’s younger brother.

What present-day politician most reminds you of Jefferson?

There were plenty of parallels with Bill Clinton, but Clinton was more of a backslapping pol. Jefferson was more aloof and shy. Jefferson believed in decentralized government, and we’ve got a lot of people who still believe that.

What are the similarities and differences between writing history and writing mysteries?

What’s similar is the kind of imaginative exercise a novelist uses to get inside the head of a character and to let that character tell them their motives and feelings, and caring about the characters and seeing the patterns. The differences are, as much as I would like to make up the dialogue of what Tom said to Sally and what Sally said to Tom, you just don’t get to do that!

Wolf Schneider has been editor in chief of the Santa Fean, editor of Living West, and consulting editor at Southwest Art.

[back to the top]

Discover more Southwest authors in our archives.