A Sign of Her Own By Sarah Marsh ... Ellen Lark is on the verge of marriage when she and her fiance receive an unexpected visit from Alexander Graham Bell. Ellen knows immediately what Bell really wants from her. Ellen is deaf, and for a time was Bell's student in a technique called Visible Speech. As he instructed her in speaking, Bell also confided in her about his dream of producing a device which would transmit the human voice along a wire: the telephone. Now, on the cusp of wealth and renown, Bell wants Ellen to speak up in support of his claim to the patent to the telephone, which is being challenged by rivals. But Ellen has a different story to tell: that of how Bell betrayed her, and other deaf pupils, in pursuit of ambition and personal gain, and cut Ellen off from a community in which she had come to feel truly at home. It is a story no one around Ellen seems to want to hear - but there may never be a more important time for her to tell it.
Author
![Sarah Marsh]()
Sarah Marsh
Professor Marsh studies anglophone literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, with focus on the western Atlantic history of race and slavery. In support of her book project, Novel Constitutions: Bodies of Law and Fictions of Race, 1688-1818, Professor Marsh was a Penick Fellow at the Smithsonian Institute Libraries in Washington, DC. Her other research interests include medical humanities, law and literature, and the history of the novel. Professor Marsh's classes study core humanities texts—from Plato to Saint Augustine to Jane Austen to Frederick Douglass—to explore what it means to be human. By reading these texts with charity, and in a wisdom-seeking way, her students learn how to cultivate a life of the mind as a resource for human flourishing.