How Do You Like Your History? With Imaginative Leaps or Grounded in Fact?

New York Times

07-03-2025

It takes a lot for me to lose patience. My first biography, 'The Peabody Sisters,' about three unsung heroines of New England's Transcendentalist movement, took two decades to research and write, yet my interest in the thousands of pages of handwritten letters and journals I — a stickler for accuracy — had to read to tell their life stories never waned. The same held true through the seven years I spent on a biography of the sisters' better-known colleague Margaret Fuller, friend to Ralph Waldo Emerson, editor of Henry David Thoreau and the leading American feminist of her day. (One life, one-third the time!)
Maybe that's why it took only a few seconds for me to blow my top over an email from a librarian in Groton, Mass., inviting me to speak about Fuller, who'd lived a few crucial years in the town. I'd skimmed the librarian's email and picked up the key details — Margaret Fuller, Community Read of 2025, the popularity of your visit two years ago. Halfway through drafting a message of acceptance, I realized my mistake: It wasn't my book that had been chosen for the town to read. It was 'Finding Margaret Fuller,' Allison Pataki's newly published historical novel, her sixth in a decade, all but one featuring a female renegade. (That's 1.67 years per book.) I was being called in to offer an expert's gloss.
I had not gone rusty regarding Margaret Fuller. I'd just spent five years collaborating with two Fuller scholars on 'Margaret Fuller: Collected Writings,' which was published in February by the Library of America. I was still at the top of this game. I could be pardoned, I thought, for misreading the invitation. Could this history-conscious blue-state exurb really have chosen fiction over fact?
But I can't be pardoned for blowing up at a librarian. Yes, I'm ashamed to say, I let her have it. Had she read far enough in the book (Page 27) to find that Pataki's Margaret Fuller knows how to swim? (Fuller drowned in 1850 at age 40 in a shipwreck within sight of shore because, like most women and men and even many sailors in her day, she couldn't swim.) In the novel, Fuller's mother warns her daughter against earning her living by public speaking, citing a law forbidding women to collect fees for lecturing. No such law. In any case, Fuller's widowed mother relied on her adult daughter for advice, not the other way around.
And what of more trivial yet telling gaffes? At dinner with the Emersons, Fuller takes 'quick, appreciative spoonfuls' of a fish stew spiced with garlic and lemon, when no New Englander cooked with garlic then — few Yankees did until Julia Child's 'The French Chef' aired on WGBH in 1963. I could have continued: Working on her first book in Harvard's Gore Hall library in 1843, Pataki's Fuller marvels at the 'dust that lines the thousands of bookshelves.' Oops! Gore Hall was brand-new, just completed in 1841. Fuller accepts a job as literary editor for The New-York Tribune after Horace Greeley, her future boss, coaxes, 'I'm looking for new content.'
Garlic, dust and 'content'? Of such details worlds are made, whether fictional or non-. Part of the thrill in visiting the past through books comes from learning about its physical makeup, its inhabitants' customs and ways of expressing themselves — feeling as if you are there. Do we really want to draw back the curtain on history and find people talking and acting the way we do? In Pataki's novel, Emerson urges Fuller to 'share' her feelings; in childhood, Margaret can't 'relate' to her peers; numerous characters pause for 'a beat' before reacting, and 'throw' smirks or sideways glances at one another. Is this the past?
The librarian in Groton didn't reply — and no wonder. As a friend reminded me when I confided my fit of pique, and as I already knew from my own librarian grandmother, public library staff members simply want people to read. They don't, and shouldn't, care what.
And people are reading Pataki's 'Finding Margaret Fuller.' According to BookScan, the novel has sold nearly twice as many copies in the past year as my biography has since it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2014. Similarly, 'The Lioness of Boston' (2023), Emily Franklin's novel about the fine art collector and museum founder Isabella Stewart Gardner, is selling at nearly triple the rate of Natalie Dykstra's pitch-perfect biography, 'Chasing Beauty' (2024).
One of the most successful of these recent bio-fictions, 'The Personal Librarian' (2021), by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, was a 'Good Morning America' book club pick and has been rated by close to 200,000 readers on Goodreads, dwarfing the 1,300 garnered by Jean Strouse's exemplary 'Morgan: American Financier' (1999), which broke the story of Belle da Costa Greene, the Black woman whose decision to pass as white enabled her to curate J.P. Morgan's collection of rare books and manuscripts.
I know: I'm beginning to sound like Nathaniel Hawthorne, inaccurately portrayed in 'Finding Margaret Fuller' as the 'local rogue,' who notoriously complained, in a letter to his publisher, of the 'damn'd mob of scribbling women' whose popular novels were cutting into the sales of his own more literary fictions. Worse, I'm turning against my own kind — female writers and readers who are drawn to stories about women of the past. Maybe I shouldn't fault them for preferring leaps of the imagination over retellings grounded in fact.
Literary critics have been worrying the question of why people read what they do for decades. In 'Reading From the Heart: Women, Literature and the Search for True Love' (1994), Suzanne Juhasz speculates that women in particular seek to 'live inside' female characters as a means of experiencing the nurturing of an 'author-mother,' to 'feel her care and love, her reliability.' For such readers, the way a character speaks may not really matter as long as she inspires them; perhaps all the better if she sounds like the reader herself.
In 'Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity,' a 2001 essay, the historian Joan W. Scott questions the assumption that we should find meaning in the past through 'empathetic identification' made possible by 'universal human characteristics or … a transcendent set of traits' belonging to particular ethnic, religious or gender groups. Cultivating such identification requires a writer to establish, through narrative artifice, 'scenarios that are at once historically specific in their representation and detail and transcendent of historical specificity' into which the reader can insert herself.
Moreover, Scott, paraphrasing the philosopher Slavoj Zizek, maintains that 'the imposition of narrative logic on history is itself a fantasy.' For Scott, any rendering of the past that 'extracts coherence from confusion, reduces multiplicity to singularity' and 'enables individuals and groups to give themselves histories' is wishful thinking.
By this reasoning, my biography is not so different from Pataki's novel: Both offer a sequence of scenes that transport readers imaginatively across time. Still, I'd like to underscore Scott's phrase, 'historically specific in their representation and detail' — the garlic?
Some readers of biographical novels are plagued by the question: Did this really happen? In a biography, a reader need not be troubled by that question — or can check the author's sources, if in doubt. (I hope a few of Pataki's readers will wonder whether Hawthorne really was the 'local rogue' and look up a good biography.)
In his book 'Sublime Historical Experience' (2005), the intellectual historian Frank Ankersmit objects to the critique of 'narrativism' by Scott and others for passing off 'historical writing as being merely a variant of the novel.' There can be no perfect representation of the past — we'd need all of time to recount it — yet Ankersmit believes writers can still 'do justice' to it.
And justice, I think, is what I was seeking (and not finding) in Pataki's version of Margaret Fuller. There are plenty of biographical novels in which facts and accurately rendered period detail support a made-up plot. Colm Tóibín's 'The Master' won me over with its astute evocation of Henry James's ruminating genius (despite a slip involving his depiction of Hawthorne's sisters). My favorites are novels that don't seek to pass for biographies, in which the play of the author's imagination with people of the past takes center stage, and questions of verisimilitude recede: Matthew Pearl's literary whodunit, 'The Dante Club'; Rebecca Goldstein's intellectual Gothic, 'The Dark Sister'; Alice Hoffman's fanciful romance, 'The Invisible Hour.'
But artful fictions aren't what readers of 'Finding Margaret Fuller' are necessarily looking for. Through the decades I spent writing my first biography, I often glanced up at a quotation I'd taped to the wall above my desk from a 1987 essay by Cynthia Ozick in The New York Times that addressed 'our unslakable infatuation with the rich-blooded old novel's royal cousin,' biography. This was a time when formal experimentation was de rigueur in fiction and the death of the novel was routinely predicted.
'With genius as its frequent subject,' Ozick wrote, 'biography is the one remaining form that can — old-fashioned thought! — inspire.' Could Ozick have guessed that, in the next century, Pataki and her sister novelists would seize on just this aspect of biography? 'What a woman! What a story!' Marie Benedict wrote in a blurb for 'Finding Margaret Fuller,' adding that the book 'promises to transform every reader it touches.'
There are those who argue that 'novels have a way of getting to the truth of situations,' as the historian Robert Parkinson writes in the introduction to 'Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier' (2024); fiction can 'connect us to the past by capturing things that often elude scrupulous, source-bound historians.' Parkinson adopted Conrad's novella 'Heart of Darkness' as his lodestar in writing his nonfiction account of a Revolutionary-era episode of savagery in the Ohio River Valley. 'The totality of all the pain Kurtz has inflicted,' Parkinson contends, 'is evident more in his whispering of two ghastly words — 'the horror' — than would be a list of all of his colonial crimes.'
Yet I doubt that's true. 'Heart of Darkness' is a psychological drama, no more an exposé of 'colonial crimes' than 'Moby-Dick' is of the barbaric whaling industry. Both works are diminished if read for information; nor is historical 'justice' served. Adam Hochschild's 'King Leopold's Ghost' is the narrative (nonfiction) I'd turn to if I wanted to take in 'the horror' of what happened in the Congo. I'd even prefer the list.
I let a few days pass and then emailed my apology to the librarian, offering to give the talk after all, and I was forgiven. I hope that some in my audience will be moved to read other books about and, more urgently, by Margaret Fuller — her utterly original 'Summer on the Lakes, in 1843' and 'Woman in the Nineteenth Century'; her letters and journals now in print — and discover that one needn't break a law or know how to swim to be a bold woman.
Maybe someone will be inspired to replicate the meal served by the Emersons at an 'all-day party' on Sept. 1, 1837, when Fuller and other members of the Transcendental Club gathered to celebrate their host's delivery of the 'American Scholar' address at Harvard the day before: a 'noble great piece' of beef, a leg of mutton, cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, applesauce and rice pudding with currants. 'The office of the scholar,' Emerson had told his audience, 'is to cheer, to raise and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.'