By Tabitha Evans Moore
Editor & Publisher

LYNCHBURG, Tenn. — For July, the Moore County Public Library’s Brown Bag Book Club will spend the month with a soldier whose biggest secret wasn’t a battle plan — it was her own identity.

The group’s current read is Amy Harmon’s A Girl Called Samson, a historical novel inspired by the true story of Deborah Samson, a Massachusetts woman who disguised herself as a man to fight in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. The novel follows Samson from a hard childhood as an indentured servant through her years in uniform, where her courage in battle is matched by the risk of her secret being discovered — and by an unexpected love that complicates everything.

The book club meets the last Friday of each month and will discuss A Girl Named Samson on July 31.

BASED ON A TRUE STORY

Deborah Samson was a real person. Born in 1760 in Plympton, Massachusetts, she enlisted in the Continental Army in 1782 under the name Robert Shurtliff and served for roughly a year and a half before a fever led to the discovery of her sex. She is remembered today as one of the few documented women to fight in the Revolutionary War in disguise, and Massachusetts later recognized her as the state’s official heroine. Harmon’s novel takes that documented history and builds a full emotional life around it — Samson’s childhood as an indentured servant, her time on the battlefield, and a complicated love story with the general she serves under, all while carrying the daily risk of discovery.

For readers who enjoy historical fiction with a strong factual backbone, the novel offers an immersive look at the day-to-day realities of the Continental Army — camp life, military strategy, the long stretches of hardship between battles — alongside the more intimate question of what it cost a woman to claim a place in a war that wasn’t supposed to be hers to fight.

A HISTORY OF WOMEN STEPPING UP

Samson’s story is also part of a much longer pattern in American history: women stepping into roles they were officially barred from whenever the nation needed them most. During the Civil War, women on both sides served as spies, couriers, and occasionally soldiers in disguise, much as Samson had decades earlier. During World War II, that same impulse produced Rosie the Riveter and the millions of American women who filled the factories, shipyards, and assembly lines while the men who normally worked them were overseas — not because the work was suddenly available to them, but because the country had no one else to do it.

That thread runs in a fairly straight line from Deborah Samson’s Continental Army disguise to the riveters of the 1940s: when the moment demanded it, women did the work and bore the risk, whether or not the country was ready to officially acknowledge it. A Girl Called Samson gives that pattern a name and a face at its very beginning, which is part of why it has resonated with readers and book clubs well beyond its historical setting.

The Brown Bag Book Club meets monthly at the Moore County Public Library. Readers are welcome to bring their lunch, as the name suggests, and join the conversation. They’ll meet next on Friday, July 31 a 1 p.m. The library is located at 17 Majors Boulevard in Lynchburg. •

About the Lynchburg Times: The Lynchburg Times is Moore County’s locally owned, independent news source and the only Lynchburg media source own by a Lynchburg native. We are also one of the few women-owned media organizations in the state. Our reporting is supported by readers, small business partners, and underwriters who believe community journalism matters. If this story was valuable to you, consider becoming a supporter at lynchburgtimes.com.