Brenda Murphy

Brenda Murphy is the author of more than twenty books. Recently she has been writing mainly historical fiction. Her latest books include When Light Breaks Through: A Salem Witch Trials Story (2023), Becoming Carlotta: A Biographical Novel (2018), based on the life of the actress Carlotta Monterey, and After the Voyage: An Irish American Story (2016), historical fiction based on the experience of her immigrant family in the Boston area from 1870 until the 1930s. After teaching at universities in New York and Connecticut, Brenda now lives in Maryland where she enjoys writing full time surrounded by deer and horse farms.

When Light Breaks Through: A Salem Witch Trials Story

Historical Fiction

When Light Breaks Through takes us beyond the witch trials to tell a compelling, expansive story of what happened in Salem Village. In 1692, twelve-year-old Ann Putnam and the other ringleaders of the “afflicted children” bring devastation to the colonial New England village. Beginning as a daring, adolescent game, their accusations of witchcraft lead to twenty executions and scores of imprisonments, wreck families and create deep and bitter divisions among the people. Five years later, Joseph Green, a young schoolteacher who is in love and eager to marry, takes on the ministry that no one else wants and with it the mission of healing Salem Village. With some dramatic actions that earn the people’s respect, Joseph makes progress in his quest to bring them together, but he knows that true fellowship will elude them while the hostility from the witch trials casts a shadow over every relationship and encounter. When the opportunity comes, Joseph helps Ann to make an appeal that could finally unite the people.

After the Voyage: An Irish American Story

Historical Fiction

At the heart of After the Voyage is an American immigrant family making its way forward on a road that is sometimes rocky and steep. From different counties in Ireland, Maggie Qualter and Richard Terrett both sail to America as young adults in 1870 after surviving Ireland’s Great Hunger as children. After the death of the young wife he loves passionately, Richard marries Maggie with the help of a deceptive go-between who brews trouble in their marriage that never goes away. They raise three children in the midst of Irish American culture, the Catholic Church, and Richard’s battles for the workingman in the Knights of Labor. Their daughter Mary dreams of being a nun, while Josie seeks the freedom of big-city life in Boston. Neither reckons on the future she will face. Son Tom escapes factory life by joining the Navy, manages to see the world in the midst of two wars, and comes home to marry his sweetheart and start a new life. Their stories are both remarkable and familiar to everyone whose ancestors made their way to and in America.

Becoming Carlotta: A Biographical Novel

Historical Fiction

Hazel Tharsing was born in California in 1888. Intensely shy, she learned to meet the world as the glamorous actress Carlotta Monterey, the greatest acting role of her twenty-year career. Counted among the most beautiful women in America, she married a British aristocrat in London, then the son of her mother’s lover in San Francisco, then a famous artist in New York, and finally America’s greatest playwright, Eugene O’Neill, in Paris .

This novel about her life is an imagined narrative built on a base of facts with the goal of understanding what it meant for Hazel Tharsing to live her fascinating life as Carlotta Monterey. It takes us to the cities and the back country of the Old West, to Edwardian London and an English country-house life reminiscent of Downton Abbey’s, to the Broadway theater in its golden age and the tough reality of the actor’s life on the road, and to bohemian Greenwich Village and Manhattan’s Smart Set in the 1920s. Through it all, Carlotta is an outsized presence, inventing endless new faces to meet the challenges that life throws her way and turning from every defeat and disillusionment to look ahead with newfound energy and determination.