Since its release on June 16, former Vermont cartoonist laureate Tillie Walden’s new graphic novel, Charity & Sylvia, has generated a lot of buzz, both locally and nationally. But the response hasn’t all been positive.
Vermont Humanities selected the book, which tells the story of the state’s first documented openly gay couple, as the Vermont Reads book of 2026, and a New York Times review called the work “intensively researched and beautifully rendered.” But in an open letter posted on social media on June 29, Canadian historian and author Rachel Hope Cleves claimed that Walden’s graphic novel is an unauthorized adaptation of her 2014 biography, Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. Cleves’ allegations have sparked a discourse about scholarly ethics and the line between artistic interpretation and appropriation.
Both Cleves’ and Walden’s books focus on the tale of two women, Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, who lived together for 44 years and ran a successful tailoring business in early 19th-century Weybridge. Cleves’ book, published by Oxford University Press, was based on eight years of her original research in “at least twenty different archives” across the country, according to her letter, including the Henry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury. (The museum houses the Bryant and Drake archives, which include letters, diaries and a silhouette, the only known depiction of the two women.) Walden’s graphic novel, which she wrote during her term as cartoonist laureate from 2023 to 2026, was created with support from Vermont Humanities and released by graphic novel publisher Drawn & Quarterly.
Cleves learned of Walden’s project in 2024, she told Seven Days, and was initially supportive. She received an advance copy of the graphic novel in spring 2025 but “did not have the capacity” to read it at the time, she said. Cleves added that she was not aware it would have the same title and similar cover art to her own — both book covers show the women’s silhouettes.
In her open letter, posted on Bluesky and Instagram, Cleves acknowledges her appreciation and enjoyment of Walden’s work but says she is not satisfied with the attribution she has received.
“She has adapted my book without credit or compensation, and claimed my research for her own,” the letter reads. As first reported by Publishers Weekly and Comics Beat, Cleves said Walden’s book uses the same facts and narrative structure as her biography.
Ellery Foutch, an associate professor of American studies at Middlebury College and president of the Henry Sheldon Museum board of trustees, said this claim surprised her. Foutch, who specializes in 19th-century American art and material culture, told Seven Days by email that Cleves’ biography follows a “fairly strict chronology,” while Walden’s graphic novel is told through a series of vignettes. Foutch also wrote that Walden’s work combines archival research with “empathetic imagination in order to illuminate the gaps or absences in the historical record.”
Though the chronology of the two works differs, they contain many of the same scenes.
Drawn & Quarterly, based in Montréal, has defended Walden’s research and citation methods and denied that the work is an adaptation, saying it does not simply “illustrate” Cleves’ book. Walden, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has remained silent.
Cleves said her work included transcribing and decoding Drake’s entire diary, since much of it was written in shorthand, and going through tax and real estate records in Weybridge. The final product is a work of narrative nonfiction that has been praised for its extensive research and for Cleves’ ability to weave facts into a story.
Walden, a Norwich resident, also visited the Henry Sheldon Museum archives and pored over more than 900 pages of letters, poems and journal entries stored there, as Seven Days reported in 2024. She references Cleves’ book in one paragraph in the afterword, citing it as “the formidable, endlessly informative history on [the women’s] lives written by Rachel Hope Cleves,” without which her “job would have been much harder.” A more detailed bibliography on the graphic novel’s website mentions Cleves’ book more than 50 times and notes that Walden’s research process included reading the book twice and beginning to sketch as she read.
“It is not possible for me to overstate how important Rachel Hope Cleves’ book on the subject was to this project,” Walden wrote.
Cleves told Seven Days that because Walden’s book is also titled Charity & Sylvia and because Walden’s platform as a cartoonist is larger than Cleves’ as an academic, it has become more difficult for readers to find her biography.
Alison Bechdel, who served as Vermont’s third cartoonist laureate and is best known for the “Dykes to Watch Out for” comic strip and Fun Home graphic memoir, said she sympathizes with Cleves, though she thinks the reason Walden’s book has garnered so much attention has to do with its accessible format as much as its content.
“[Cleves] is right. Tillie’s book is going to supersede her book,” Bechdel told Seven Days. “That is, I think, as much a commentary on our postliterate era as anything else.”
Walden’s graphic novel has been extremely popular since it hit the shelves; many local bookstores are sold out, and it already has a wait list of 31 people at the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington.
The controversy has raised questions about what constitutes an adaptation versus a new work inspired by previous works. Glynnis Fawkes, a Burlington cartoonist who has written numerous historical books in both categories, said the distinction has to do with how many sources an artist consults and what information those sources provide.
One of Fawkes’ books, Charlotte Brontë Before Jane Eyre, was inspired by multiple sources. Fawkes wrote in an email that her academic background helped guide her as she blended published factual evidence, including “letters, biographies, and historical objects like Charlotte’s writing desk,” with what she was “imagining and inventing,” such as facial expressions and conversations.
Fawkes explained that the case of the two Charity & Sylvia books is unusual, since there are so few published works about the women. Although Walden’s graphic novel is a unique medium, she said, Cleves’ book is the original and definitive source on the subject.
Beyond Walden’s original artistic interpretation, Bechdel noted that the cartoonist also invented dialogue, since Cleves’ book does not include any fictionalized scenes or conversations.
Coco Moseley, executive director of the Henry Sheldon Museum, wrote in an email to Seven Days that Walden spent “considerable time” at the archives studying “the textures of everyday life — how people spoke, what they wore, what they ate, what sat on their tables, what they read, and how they moved through their community.” These details, Moseley wrote, were essential to building the visual aspects of Bryant and Drake’s lives.
The Henry Sheldon Museum released a statement in support of Walden, noting that “archives exist to be studied, interpreted, questioned, and reimagined” by different scholars. The museum expressed its belief that both Cleves’ and Walden’s works are valuable in their own rights and that Walden sufficiently cited Cleves for the inspiration and information she provided. Moseley wrote in an email that she believes both books can work in tandem to provide a fuller understanding of Bryant and Drake.
Ideally, Moseley wrote, readers of Walden’s popular graphic novel would seek out Cleves’ scholarship to learn more about the history. “Historical understanding is cumulative,” she wrote. “It rarely begins with a single researcher or ends with a single book.”
In a statement on Bluesky, Drawn & Quarterly wrote that “there is no way the two books can be mistaken for the other” and expressed hope that “the lives of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake continue to be told and shared in a myriad of ways.”
Cleves responded by commenting on the post: “You took my title, cover, and story and buried a one-sentence acknowledgement in the back,” she wrote. “The rest of your statement is hand-waving.”
Vermont Humanities executive director Christopher Kaufman Ilstrup, who originally brought the idea for the graphic novel to Walden, wrote in an email that Cleves’ work is “very different from Tillie’s creative, artistic version of the women’s story that works to fill in the gaps in the archival record by imagining a fully realized world for early 19th-century Weybridge and a rich interior life for the two women.” He also wrote that Cleves’ book is one of the primary supplemental materials endorsed by Vermont Humanities for Vermont Reads 2026 and that he encourages readers to seek it out. The Vermont Humanities website references Cleves’ work and notes that it “first unearthed the story.”
“The story of Sylvia Drake and Charity Bryant and their community is rich and deep,” Ilstrup wrote. “It can clearly support the many different forms that contemporary community engagement can take today in 2026.”
Cleves said she will not take legal action against Walden or her team but would like Drawn & Quarterly to be transparent about the factual and narrative origins of Walden’s graphic novel. She told Seven Days that her main concern is not the existence of Walden’s book — in fact, she praised the artwork and creative choices — but rather the fact that the online bibliography that extensively cites Cleves is not readily accessible to readers and that Cleves’ contributions are not noted in the novel’s marketing.
“I just wish that they had been ethical about the appropriation of my work,” Cleves said. “If I had my druthers, they’d stop marketing it as historically original and they’d put that information up front so that buyers could know, instead of burying one sentence in the very back.”
Foutch offered a broader view: Citations can take various forms, she wrote, as long as information is accessible to readers.
“The most important aspect of citation,” Foutch wrote, “is that it credits its sources in such a way that future readers or researchers have the ability to identify and locate the original sources.”
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