The Empresario’s Wife

The Woman at the Center of the Texas Revolution

Sarah’s journey from St. Louis to Texas catches her up in a love triangle, forces her into a struggle for her family’s survival, and pitches her headlong into the whirlwind of war.

It is 1827 and Sarah Seely DeWitt finds herself at the center of Texas history in its earliest and bloodiest period.

Based on actual events leading up to the 1836 Texas Revolution, The Empresario’s Wife chronicles the struggles of a young American Everywoman and the events that change her and the nation forever.

Cover by Michelle Bushneff.

Visit these online booksellers to preorder now before the book launches on Oct. 1.

About the Author

Barbara H. Seeber is a fiction and nonfiction writer who has produced many books for The National Geographic Society.

Her forthcoming novel, The Empresario’s Wife, tells the story of a remarkable woman who helped shape the earliest beginnings of Texas. The novel reflects the author’s consuming interest in history.

What People Are Saying

This is early Texas history as it has never been told, the tale of how women carried the burden and played a critical role in the founding of the state. The Empresario’s Wife is a very important novel, a groundbreaker.
— Kathryn Johnson, Author of The Gentleman Poet and other historical novels

The research and imagination displayed in scene after compelling scene of this novel is staggering. The story closely follows the actual historical events with a lean prose style and straightforward storytelling that illuminate the history of the nation.
— Peter Molin, Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University

In this epic family tale, part history, part legend, gifted storyteller Barbara Seeber ventures into the Texas of the 1820s and 30s, a wild sometimes brutal land, but a land of freedom and opportunity. Feisty Sarah Seeley DeWitt, Seeber’s four-time great grandmother, meets it head on. She is wife of Green DeWitt, one of the state’s founding fathers, or empresarios, along with fabled Stephen F. Austin. With heart and guts she guides her family through a tenuous settlement, cholera, attack, loss, and deep loves—of her children, her new nation, and a longtime childhood friend with whom she might have shared her life. Determined, committed, Sarah’s character is real, timeless, and page-turning. Seeber’s insightful research takes us into places and events little known but vital to the Texas and American story. Among other acts of courage and dedication Sarah and her children fashion the Texas “Come and Take It Flag” that flies in the first battle of the Texas Revolution in 1835—and she witnesses the fight. For Seeber to have re-discovered Sarah and brought her to life through dynamic, uplifting prose, is a gift to her family, to Texas, to all her revere the story of America, and especially to women. Here is a hero.
— Barbara Brownell Grogan, Former Editor-in-Chief, National Geographic Books; President, Rivanna Publishing Ventures

The history of a nation is made up of a multitude of individual human stories. Barbara Seeber offers us an important contribution to those stories by bringing to life the singular and unforgettable Sarah Seely DeWitt, who takes us with her on her journey from a safe and comfortable home in Missouri to her new uncharted life in a wild, starkly beautiful landscape in the emerging state of Texas. The story of ever-present dangers and redeeming love that Sarah shares helps us fill in one more piece of the complex American story, narrated in vivid and compelling detail by a woman who lived it.
— Esther Mackintosh, President Emerita, Federation of State Humanities Councils

Map of Southeastern Texas Circa 1836