Author Martha Hall Kelly shows off her book, ‘Lilac Girls.’ She will discuss her latest novel, ‘Sunflower Sisters,’ at a virtual event on July 22. The discussion is sponsored by The Friends of the Library.

NASHUA – Author Martha Hall Kelly will discuss her latest book, “Sunflower Sisters,” in a virtual visit sponsored by The Friends of the Library on July 22 from 7-8 p.m. Kelly will be interviewed by former state Sen. Melanie Levesque. Space for the Zoom event is limited.

Kelly, who lives in Connecticut, said “Sunflower Sisters” is part of a series of three books, as each book is a stand-alone about the same family. She came up with the idea for writing the books in 2000.

“I was an advertising copywriter, and I had quit my job,” she shared. “I had three kids, and after my mother died, it was Mother’s Day and I was really down. So my husband said, ‘Why don’t you go see the house that you’ve always wanted to see?’ He knew I wanted to see it because I had cut out a magazine article and the headline of it was ‘Caroline’s Incredible Lilacs.'”

As a lover of lilacs, Kelly was drawn to Bellamy-Ferriday House and Garden, which is located in Bethlehem, Connecticut.

“She had passed away in 1990, but left her house as a museum,” Kelly said. “I visited the gardens and I toured the house. I was the only person on the tour, but nowadays, there are 80 people a day. That’s where I discovered the story.”

Moving to Bethlehem from New York City when she was 9 years old, Miss Ferriday spent 78 summers on her property. It was in 1912 when her parents, Henry and Eliza Ferriday, purchased the property as a summer residence for themselves and their only child Caroline. The Ferridays updated the house with modern amenities such as heat, electricity, and plumbing. Mrs. Ferriday and daughter Caroline designed a formal parterre garden which today features historic roses, peonies, lilacs, and numerous fragrant trees and shrubs, making the site a destination for gardeners. In addition to gardening, Miss Ferriday supported many social justice and human rights causes. Miss Ferriday supported the Free France Movement during World War II and secured medical assistance for Ravensbruck Concentration Camp survivors, receiving the Cross of Lorraine and the French Legion of Honor medal for her efforts.

Kelly said Ferriday was a philanthropist and a Broadway actress in NYC, and Charles de Gaulle’s niece, Genevieve, was a friend of hers who had been imprisoned at the Rosenberg Concentration Camp.

“She knew these Polish girls that had been experimented on,” Kelly explained. “Fifty-four of them survived and went back to Poland; there were 74 originally experimented on. They were terrible experiments with gangrene. They mutilated these girls.”

In Poland, under Stalin, these girls had no medical care, so Ferriday brought them to the U.S. for rehabilitation and “the trip of a lifetime.” That is the essence of Kelly’s first book, “Lilac Girls.”

Kelly’s other two books, “Lost Roses” and “Sunflower Sisters” go back in time. The former is about Caroline’s mother; the latter concerns Caroline’s great-grandmother, Jane Eliza Woolsey.

“I was really just interested in where all the philanthropy came from,” Kelly said. “It definitely came from her great-grandmother, who was a staunch abolitionist and had eight children that she raised herself in New York City.”

Peeling back the proverbial onion, Kelly discovered more and more as she kept digging.

“Absolutely,” she said. “There are three archives – one in France, one at the Holocaust Museum in D.C. but the main one is underneath the house in the root cellar. I spent a lot of time down there and there is a whole wall of Civil War letters. Talk about peeling back the layers.”

Kelly said in every letter, there was something that would make a great scene in the book. She had a lot to choose from. And the most startling discovery from the letters was just how many there were.

“There were a thousand,” she said. “It was like their email. It was from the mother to the eight children and then from the eight children to each other. So, I really got to know each of the characters because they’re all in the book, by their handwriting and their senses of humor.”

It took Kelly about a year to read every letter. She photocopied them and brought them home.

“I couldn’t just stay in the archives to read them all,” she said. “I was also writing at the same time. At night, I would read four or five. It was fascinating. A first-hand account of something is pretty amazing.”

When she worked in advertising, Kelly knew she was destined to write a book.

“I worked at J. Walter Thompson in Chicago on salad dressings,” she said with a laugh. “And I always thought that was my dream to work in advertising, but I kept writing continuing characters. And my boss kept saying, ‘You can’t do that. You have to write one commercial and that’s it.’ That should have been my first indication.”

There aren’t more books to follow in this line; the next book goes forward in time to the 1950s. Weaving that common thread throughout the three books was fun for Kelly, she said.

“For example, the Woolsey silver, I talk about it in ‘Lilac Girls,'” she said. “And in ‘Sunflower Sisters,’ I can the see the Woolseys actually using the silver. So there is an easter egg in each of the books, which is kind of fun.”

Currently, for her fifth book, Kelly is writing a thriller and reading a lot of them to boot – which she said is “super scary.”

“I can’t read historical fiction while I’m writing it,” she said. “I don’t want to be influenced by it.”

Once Kelly formulated the plan for writing the thriller, she found that it was based on her own very house.

“The fifth is a plain old current day thriller set in my own house,” she said. “I know! It’s very scary writing it. My husband said we’re going to have to move. Spoiler alert: I can’t even go in the basement anymore.”

To register for this Zoom event sponsored by the Nashua Public Library, visit nashualibrary.org.