Editor's Note: Dear Abigail, the revealing story about the progressive views of Abigail Adams and her two sisters, is the most recent book by author Diane Jacobs, who has spent the past ten years dusting off the fascinating lives of the three sisters through their many letters. Their enlightened and proto-feminist views are rendered not through the prism of our second U.S. President but on their own merit, as cultured, educated and independent women of the 18th century. To learn more about how the sisters came to life through Diane Jacobs's research and writing process, read on.

Biographile: Dear Abigail is so full of intriguing letters. It must have required a lot of research on your part.

Diane Jacobs: Yes, this was a book that required months and years of immersing myself in primary source material. I'd like to complain, but, truthfully, the characters were so vivid, their writing -- whether on the Enlightenment or neighborhood gossip -- so compelling that I thoroughly enjoyed the quest. Believe it or not, after only a decade, I was sorry to leave them.

BIOG: There were some highly amusing letters between John and Abigail Adams, but what did Abigail have to say to her sisters, or they to her and each other?

DJ: Since there are no survivors to tell the tale, what I know came exclusively through their letters. Abigail, the middle girl, was by far the easiest to track down. The most important and usually the only choice a woman made in America in the 18th c. was who she married. Marrying John Adams -- who would become an architect of the Declaration of Independence, America's first Ambassador to Great Britain, first Vice President and second President of the United States -- assured her a prominent place in many archives, most notably the amazing Massachusetts Historical Society. Then too, not only has her correspondence with John been widely published, but there's a fascinating book of letters which Abigail wrote to her older sister and best friend Mary Cranch, first when she was away in Europe and later when she followed John to New York, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. My challenge in evoking Abigail was to read everything she'd ever written so I could make her come alive from a fresh point of view.

My far greater challenge was with the other two sisters. Thanks again to the Massachusetts Historical Society, the basic facts were clear. Like Abigail, Mary Cranch and Elizabeth Shaw Peabody were daughters of a Puritan minister. Mary, being the eldest, was the uncrowned Queen of the siblings. (Puritans believed in the hierarchy of age). Later her intelligence and strong administrative abilities made her the de facto mayor of the small town where both she and Abigail lived, Quincy, Massachusetts.

Elizabeth Shaw Peabody, who never believed she got sufficient attention from either of her two elder sisters, was the best-educated and most literary of the three. In the golden age of letter-writing, her goal was to vie with Madame de Sevigne and compose correspondence as thrilling as the finest male prose.

BIOG: Did she succeed?

DJ: Ah, for the answer to that you'll have to read the book. But the reason I know what happened to Elizabeth and Mary is that they were both almost as prolific as Abigail. Moreover, like John and John Quincy Adams, their husbands and children -- and sisters -- recognized their talent (or, in eighteenth century parlance, their "genius") and saved what they wrote.

BIOG: How did you find these letters?

DJ: I sleuthed around and discovered a treasure trove of Elizabeth's correspondence at the Library of Congress. To my delight, it ranged from her highly opinionated letters about literature when she was a teenager to her old age descriptions of life at the second co-educational preparatory school in America: which she helped found.

Mary's correspondence was all over the place, but I was particularly impressed by the small archive which now resides at the Albany Institute of History and Art. I had found her the most difficult of the three characters to bring to life until I came upon a letter she wrote Abigail saying how benighted men were to imagine women's intellects were different from their own. Mary's statement contradicted the sacred eighteenth -century view that a woman could use either her mind or her uterus, but not both. If she dared to think like a man, she would be sterile; whereas if she behaved according to the eighteenth- century norm and bore children, it was no wonder she could not discuss Locke and Rousseau. Here was my clue that Mary (who had three children and could discuss anything) was a proto-feminist, and I found even more provocative statements on the rights and abilities of women in her correspondence as she aged.

BIOG: When it was all said and done, which sister did you prefer?

DJ: My feeling is that I love them all equally, but I guess that's for the reader to gauge.