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

Novelized accounts of historical figures’ lives are hugely popular. But do we really want to draw back the curtain on history and find people talking and acting the way we do?

By Megan Marshall

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. Read the full story at the New York Times.