"Some secrets are safe from any biographer. Chance may eliminate a vital witness or burn a letter that could have opened flood gates of understanding. Madame of the Heights is as true as two years of research and two years of the author's inner search could discover." --the author

Excerpt

"In the beginning before Eliza was established on Chatham Street, Aaron Burr took her to the majestic Morris Mansion on Harlem Heights. No site in Manhattan commanded such a view. From the balcony the lovers could see the Harlem the East and the Hudson rivers, with all of Manhattan below. The lovely haziness of Eastchester and New Jersey spread out on either hand. The house had been Washington's Headquarters after his retreat from the city; and burr had lived there as one of the General's military family. When Burr brought Eliza to the Heights, it was a place of assignation, an inn, the first stop on the Albany Post Road.

"This was the house Eliza would rule as Madame Jumel, the house she would share with Burr as man and wife. But that she should own so great a mansion, or that Burr should marry a courtesan was, at that time, farther from their minds than the moon from the earth."

About the Author

After graduating from the Yale School of Fine Arts, rather than face life as a mural painter, Marianne Hancock joined the Red Cross where she served in England until VE Day and the in France with unhappy troops waiting to go to the Pacific. Her first book, The Perimeter, is based on that experience.

Later when it was apparent that writing was the only form of artistic discipline compatible with raising children, she turned to journalism, working as an art critic for Arts Magazine, as drama critic for Country Magazine and feature writer for various newspapers and magazines in New York and Connecticut.

She has lived in Maine with her husband for many years.