Author Talk with Sarah Dixwell Brown

The Yale Club of Cape Cod invites the public to a talk and conversation with author Sarah Dixwell Brown about her book Regicide in the Family: Finding John Dixwell at the West Falmouth Library on Thursday, May 1,  at 6 PM. This is a free event. Please register online. Walk-ins also welcome.

In the 1660s three fugitives from justice came to New England to escape being drawn and quartered in London. They had been among the 59 judges of England’s King Charles the First who found him guilty of betraying his own people and sentenced him to death by beheading. One of the three was John Dixwell, the author’s seven greats grandfather. Her book tells the story of how, after inheriting his key to Dover Castle, she traced him in England, then New England, to learn what she could about why he judged a king, and how his decision not only sent him into exile, but helped point the way toward our Bill of Rights.

Sarah Dixwell Brown taught writing at Stanford University, Santa Clara University, Mount Holyoke College and the Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has published numerous personal essays in national and local publications. This is her first book. Because her grandfather fell in love with Woods Hole in 1905 while teaching physiology at the Marine Biological Laboratory and later bought a lot on Buzzards Bay, she has had the great good fortune of spending time here every summer of her long life. Brown lives in Western Massachusetts where, now fully retired from teaching, she is at work on a new writing project.