Biographer Rachel Hope Cleves has taken to social media to respond to the similarities between her 2014 book Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, and artist Tillie Walden’s just released Charity & Sylvia, claiming that Walden “adapted my book without credit or compensation, and claimed my research for her own.”
Posted on BlueSky, Cleves explained that she was “pained to feel the need to write this,” has kept silent up until this point about the just released graphic novel (it came out June 16, 2026 from Drawn & Quarterly), and has tried to be “happy that Walden’s book is making their story more widely known, even if she chose to take my title and my cover design as well as my narrative and my research with only a single sentence of acknowledgement at the end of her book in her notes section.”
Cleves then continues to list how the research Walden has discussed doing to uncover the history of two women who lived in an open Lesbian marriage in Vermont in the 1800s could not have come from “letters at the Henry Sheldon Museum,” as multiple parts of the graphic novel only — per Cleves — came from on-site research done for her 2014 book, including “tracking down a forgotten graveyard enclosed in a chain link fence behind a Burger King in Brockton, Massachusetts.”
As detailed in the New York Times, this book wasn’t even initially Walden’s idea: after becoming Vermont’s cartoonist laureate in 2023, the executive director of Vermont Humanities came to Walden and assigned her writing a graphic novel biography of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake. Walden, best known for Eisner-award winning work on Spinning as well as the Clementine trilogy of Walking Dead YA novels, per the article, initially deferred and offered to craft a 16-page story instead. However, after reading Cleves’ book as well as doing research at the Henry Sheldon Museum, Walden moved forward with the project, which is now in stores.
Walden, who is a self-admitted non-historian, looked to, per the Times, “the pair’s poems and business papers; the writings of family members; Cleves’s biography,” to craft the story, as well as her own imaginings of their conversations and what they looked like (as there were no photographs of the duo). And Cleves is even quoted in the Times article, noting that, “Religion was so central to Charity and Sylvia’s lives, and that’s deeply unrelatable for a lot of modern readers. I’m impressed by the fact that Tillie is writing a popular book to speak to a broad audience, but still treated the religious themes in their story with such integrity.”
And indeed, Cleves explains that she thinks Walden’s “illustrations and storytelling are wonderful” adding that the latter reached out to the former during the writing process. By contrast, she laments how “Walden’s media blitz will make my book harder for readers to find, not easier, and diminish its continuing power to have the enormously positive impact it has had to this point, which is why I feel the need to correct the record.”
You can read Cleves’ note in full below. We’ve reached out to Drawn & Quarterly for comment, but did not receive a response as of publication time.
To all the readers out there:
My deep love for Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, the subjects of my 2014 biography Charity and Sylvia, has kept me silent, up to this point, about Tillie Walden’s new graphic novel by the same title. Charity and Sylvia’s story has been so deeply meaningful to so many people—their story has, without exaggeration, saved lives-that I’ve tried to be happy that Walden’s book is making their story more widely known, even if she chose to take my title and my cover design as well as my narrative and my research with only a single sentence of acknowledgement at the end of her book in her notes section. Walden’s illustrations and storytelling are wonderful, as I told her when she reached out to me during the writing process. It would take nothing away from her hard work to be honest about how it is built on my hard work. But in Walden’s publicity tour, she has repeatedly made the claim to have based her book on her extensive research in the archive without acknowledging that her book is, in fact, based on my book. This false representation demands response not only for my sake, but for the sake of all the hard-working historians out there whose work has similarly been taken without credit. No, Walden has not “uncovered a chapter of queer history” in the archives, as her media interviews have claimed. She has adapted my book without credit or compensation, and claimed my research for her own. I don’t doubt that Walden spent time looking at letters at the Henry Sheldon Museum, but the story that Walden tells is not to be found there. It is a story that I pieced together from years of visits to at least twenty different archives and locations across the United States, not only in Vermont but in Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, and Washington State, as well. This is not just a question of facts but of story: the story of how Charity and Sylvia built a life together based in tailoring, struggled with their faith, and maintained relationships with their family is one that I constructed from the countless fragments that I gathered through painstaking research. Many of the details of that story which appeared in my book, and re-appear in Walden’s, do not come from the Henry Sheldon Museum, where she claims to have done her research. They come from the countless additional archives I visited. For just a few examples: the story about Charity’s siblings’ deaths was built on my tracking down a forgotten graveyard enclosed in a chain link fence behind a Burger King in Brockton, Massachusetts. The story about Charity learning to sew from her spinster aunt Charity Howard comes from a textile fragment that I tracked down in the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, Washington. The story about Charity buying a ring for Sylvia comes from a letter I found in an archive in Long Island, New York. And the story of how Charity and Sylvia rented their property in Vermont comes from town records that were at the village hall in Weybridge, Vermont. I could go on. It saddens me that Walden’s media blitz will make my book harder for readers to find, not easier, and diminish its continuing power to have the enormously positive impact it has had to this point, which is why I feel the need to correct the record.
Sincerely, Rachel Hope Cleves
Comic Book Club Live Info:
Share this:
Discover more from Comic Book Club
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.