The Lady in the Blue Box: Not a Love at First Sight, A Truth: Long Live the King of Broadway

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Tilar Mazzeo said in her Eliza Hamilton biography, Chapter 5, page 56: "It was not love at first sight."

She's not talking about Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. She's not even talking about Emma Woodhouse or the Dashwood sisters and their handsome gentlemen.

She's talking about Alexander Hamilton and Eliza Schuyler. And it actually happened.

My jaw made a clanging sound on the floor.

Mazzeo continued to write: "Apart from this brief encounter in Albany, it would be more than two years before Eliza would see Alexander Hamilton again. While the Revolutionary War continued to unfold on the northern front, Eliza was not there to witness the campaign or to meet with any of the young officers fighting it, although Alexander was a frequent presence. By the end of December 1777, Eliza had moved to Boston... had time to dream of romance during those next two years she would spend in New England, she thought still of Tench Tilghman."

Ah, here we go, there's the Mr. Wicked Wickham! The guy who pulled a fast disappearing trick on poor Eliza! Because as I read on in that book, he never proposed to her! And Tench Tilghman was a far better eligible bachelor than the orphaned immigrant ruffian known as Colonel Alexander Hamilton! (But we all know that she does marry Hamilton in the end, just like how Lizzie Bennet gets her flirt on with Mr. Darcy when he proposes to her the same day Mr. Bingley proposes to Jane Bennet, her sister!)

See, this is the part in which Eliza is going to push Mr. Hamilton away after she judges him for his pride with her anguish. Let's watch the fun!

Note: No, I have still not seen the musical!!! Everybody keeps telling me, "You need to see it NOW, GIRL! What are you waiting for?!"

But I'd much rather do the research first before I watch the real thing, especially since I'm WRITING A STEAMPUNK BOOK. About the REGENCY ERA. Based. On. Hamilton.

I was taking a very short walk with Alexander a couple of weeks ago, looking out at the water, taking some pictures on a very lovely day, eating lunch on the Promenade on such a beautiful day in Havre De Grace.

Who knew there were so many gazeboes around...

There were also nonstop historical landmarks all the way down, leading to a visit to the Havre De Grace Maritime Museum of Maryland:

These photos were all taken by me as I was walking around that Friday afternoon. I wanted to see more of this, to actually see the museum itself, but they were closed and only operating on the weekends due to COVID19, and there was a Pride Festival coming up later that weekend. :) (I do love and appreciate pride festivals now that I've come out as demisexual. That Saturday was known as National Coming Out Day, perfect day for a festival! The sun was shining, and people were bringing their dogs, wearing rainbows, enjoying the vendors, and enjoying the awesome music on the speakers, it was divine!)

During our brief walk, we found lots of mini free libraries (which I love to pieces), and there was a very important lighthouse on our walk, the lighthouse was eventually the place where the Pride Festival was held for National Coming Out Day.

I was stunned by all this documentation I took while I was there. Just looking back at all this, it makes me a lot closer to the amazing history that I've been missing out on since elementary and middle school every time we talked about the Revolutionary War.

It finally made me reach a breaking point of, "Where was the Hamilton Musical my entire life? Why didn't I get into it until just NOW? I- I...."

I even found a very somber and artistic picture to take at a monument to recognize all the veterans who died in the wars, fighting for our country:

Someone laid their flowers from a wedding here. It was a very powerful picture that I just had to take there, since Havre De Grace is definitely a place to hold a wedding in some parts of the town in Harford County.

And all of this scales back to Hamilton. I'm sure Eliza Hamilton left flowers on Alexander's grave in Trinity Church after he died in 1804, a bouquet of wedding flowers like these. Even though she burned her letters, she found thousands more writings that Alexander Hamilton wrote, which she decided to give to her sons to get them to write about him. She lived nearly 55 years longer to see him again, her sister Angelica was buried next to him before that time. Angelica died 10 years after Hamilton's death, 1814, the year Jane Austen published Mansfield Park, and she was currently working on finishing up Emma, to be published the following year. The musical was accurate, but not too much. It was more of a Pride and Prejudice story, but the aftermath led to Eliza becoming a trailblazing business woman and practically a superhero, in telling her husband's story posthumously.

Even the back of the book I'm reading, the plot summary of the biography, it mentions Miranda's musical as well. It's also in the first line of the Author's Note from Mazzeo herself: "Who will tell my story?" It appears that someone actually did. I'm glad. It also mentions of the reasons why Eliza burned the letters told from a social status standpoint, as a wife trapped in her husband's scandal and later as a widow.

I can't wait to get to the end of chapter five of the story. My head is buzzing with lots of inspiration and fervent desire for researching all of this. I could hardly wait to get this out of the way.

To be continued.

Playlist selection-

Coming soon this November to Netflix and select theatres... A film adaptation of this: