EDITH B. GELLES is the author of Abigail and John: Portrait of a Marriage (Morrow). She is a historian of women with a focus on colonial America and is a senior scholar at Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research (formerly the Center for Research on Women), her haven since 1983. Her first biography, The World of Abigail Adams received the American Historical Association’s Herbert Feis Award in 1994. She has edited the letters of Abigail Levy Franks (1696-1756), the earliest corpus of letters that survive by any woman in Europe’s western colonies. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals, including William and Mary Quarterly, New England Quarterly, American Quarterly and Psychohistory Review. She lives in Palo Alto, California with her husband and has two grown sons and a poodle.