Presidentess: The Life of First Lady Julia Gardner Tyler with Christopher J. Leahy and Sharon Williams Leahy (UP of Kansas, 2026)

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Jane.

So you are the perfect duo for this project.

Christopher is a John Tyler biographer, and, and you are a first lady historian, Sharon.

Yes.

So what prompted you to explore Julia Gardiner Tyler?

Well, this book developed directly out of President Without a Party.

Um, and in fact, there's, there's what I hope is a pretty entertaining story connected to that.

Uh, when I was doing my research on John Tyler, I had to go to Yale University Sterling Library, which held the Gardiner Tyler family papers.

And the archive is so vast that I could not sit there in a week and a half and go through everything I needed to get through.

So I had, uh, Yale photocopy hundreds of letters.

I, I even don't remember.

I mean, it was probably around 400 or 500 letters that I couldn't get to, uh, while I was there.

So couple weeks later, they arrived at my house in a big box, and I took the box and I, you know, opened it up, and I thought, "Wow, this is pretty daunting." So I put it on the dining room table and kinda forgot about it for a little while.

And at one point, Sharon came in and she said, "You've gotta do something with that box.

I want my dining room back.

Um, it's going out to the curb if you don't do something, you know, pretty soon." And I, you know, made the little protest about how, "Well, this is my research.

You can't do that." Uh, but it did prompt me to go and try to figure out how to read this handwriting, but I eventually realized I, I couldn't read Julia Gardiner Tyler's handwriting.

So I admitted that rather sheepishly, and Sharon said, "Well, give them here.

I'll, I'll, I'll try to do it." And so, you know, she took a couple of days and read through them and thankfully, miraculously, became proficient in reading Julia's handwriting.

And we had talked a little bit about Julia while I was working on John Tyler, and, you know, I didn't know a lot about Julia Tyler, but one of the things that I did know was that she had supposedly posed for a, a scandalous lithograph when she was a young woman.

So Sharon was reading these letters, and she came to me and she said, "I don't think she posed for it." That was the charge, that she had posed for this, this scandalous lithograph.

And I, I said, "Can you prove that?" And that's really the genesis of, of this book.

Yeah.

And Jane, I basically s- looked at it from the standpoint of art, and that's kind of a new thought to actually go after a biography looking at art.