Remembering the Ladies

Just wanted to alert people to a post on another blog -- The CockleBur -- about the difficulty, and the importance, of uncovering the role that women played in the history of the American Revolution and the Early Republic.

Full disclosure: the blog post contains a favorable mention of my novel, A More Obedient Wife -- and it was written by someone I know, Palma Strand. (Fuller disclosure: I hadn't spoken to Palma in years, but she emailed me out of the blue some weeks ago to tell me her book club was reading my book -- how she came across it I'm still not sure!) But the post also discusses other female historical figures and the late sociologist Elise Boulding, who coined the phrase "the underside of history" to describe the general absence of women from the historical record. I highly recommend it -- along with Palma's other posts, especially one called "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Godliness?"

Further Adventures in Publishing

One of the topics of this blog is "writing," and one aspect of writing -- the most vexing, often -- is getting published. So herewith, my views on the current state of the publishing industry, admittedly offered from my own rather limited vantage point:

You'd never know it from the state of most bookstores, cluttered floor to ceiling with books (this is, of course, assuming that you can still find an actual bookstore in your vicinity), but it's gotten really, really hard to get a book published. Especially a novel. And more especially a first novel, if you're not a celebrity of some sort or at least a close friend or relative of some powerful and/or famous person.

A lot of good books still get published, of course. But what may be harder to discern, from outside the industry, is that a lot of good books never get published. And a lot of not-so-good books do get published (this is something you may have actually noticed!).

When I found an agent for my first novel, about five years ago, things were tough. Now that I'm on my second agent and second novel, things are even tougher. Now, instead of routinely sending out rejections, a number of editors have apparently given up sending out anything. At the moment, four editors have had my novel for over two months; one has had it for three months; and one has had it for five months. We've had no response from any of them, despite my agent's efforts, and there's no indication we ever will. If I thought there was more than an infinitesimal chance that any of them would take it, I might be content to wait. But my agent has had the manuscript for over a year now, and frankly the prospect of being in this limbo indefinitely is beginning to get to me.

In the old days -- a few years ago, that is -- authors really had no alternative but to wait. It was mainstream publishing or pretty much nothing. That's not true anymore. As the mainstream publishing industry has contracted and fossilized, new publishing life forms have been springing up like mushrooms after a heavy rain.

Perhaps the largest, and most obvious, new form is self-publishing. Thanks to low-cost print-on-demand technology, the number of self-published books has far surpassed the number of traditionally published books (according to a New York Times article, the figures for 2009 were 764,448 self-published books to 288,355 traditionally published books, and those figures have no doubt diverged more widely since then).

Most of these books, of course, languish in obscurity -- and in many cases, that obscurity is no doubt well deserved. After all, with self-published books there's no vetting, no cultural gatekeeper letting in the sheep and keeping out the goats (or is it the other way around?). Who's to say that any of these books are worth reading? Some self-published authors -- the ones setting down memories for their grandchildren, for example -- don't really care about reaching a wider audience. But for those who do, the question is how to get your self-published book to stand out from all the others.

When I resorted to self-publishing my first book, A More Obedient Wife, I did so with a heavy heart. I was embarrassed to admit that I'd self-published, but I figured I'd just give the book to friends and family. It was only after I started hearing from a few strangers who told me they'd loved the book that I began to think bigger.

And that's how I began to discover that there actually were some mechanisms falling into place that enabled a self-published author like me to secure some objective seals of approval -- someone other than little old me saying, hey, read this book. I entered it into two contests open to self-published authors, and it won awards in both (had I been more savvy, I could have taken advantage of other similar contests). I put it up on sites like Goodreads, where members list and rate the books they're reading. I urged readers who told me they liked the book to review it on Amazon, where at one point I was up to 11 reviews, all five-star (somehow, that number has mysteriously shrunk to 10).

And I sent it in to a website called Indiereader, which I had read about in the New York Times article mentioned above. Indiereader not only gave the book a favorable review, they included it in a program that funnels selected self-published books to independent bookstores around the country. Indiereader has also started reaching out to book clubs, giving them (in the words of its founder, Amy Edelman) "a dedicated page, the opportunity to do Q&As with authors (when they're able), to share their faves with other book clubs, and the chance to discover something new." And recently a book group in Pennsylvania that found my book through the Indiereader website picked it as one of their selections--thank you, Bad Girls Book Club of Broomall, PA!

I've also noticed that some of the numerous self-publishing companies (or "indie publishing" companies, as they're now beginning to style themselves) have started programs that incorporate this vetting function. Abbott Press, a division of Writer's Digest (which sponsors a self-published book award that my first novel won), will publish any book -- but, for a fee, you can have your book considered for a "Writer's Digest Mark of Quality" that indicates "high literary merit."

Of course, chances are that even a book with the "Writer's Digest Mark of Quality" isn't going to hit the New York Times bestseller list. With a few notable exceptions (mostly fantasy and romance writers), self-published authors are never going to strike it rich. In fact, despite the hype you'll hear from self-publishing companies, we're almost certain to lose money rather than make it. But for me -- and, I suspect, for many others -- it's not about making a killing, or even a living. I just want at least a few people -- okay, maybe a few hundred -- to read what I write. And these days, the mainstream publishing industry, whose denizens are so certain that they know what's deserving of publication and what isn't, can't stop me.

Ding Dong, Osama's Dead

"Osama dead!!!" my college-age daughter texted me last night at 11:18.

"So I hear," I texted back. "Didn't get details."

At 11:30 she texted me again: "waiting for Obama to speak..."

I was already in bed. Each time my cell phone dinged with an incoming text message, I had to haul myself out of bed and travel to the end of the walk-in closet where my phone was recharging. "Going to sleep," I texted back before switching my phone to silent.

This morning I found a last word from my daughter: "LAME go watch, history in the making!!"

Call me LAME, but I'm finding myself strangely unmoved by this turn of events--and surprised that everyone else in the country seems to find it earth-shaking, especially the college-age kids like my daughter who were only children at the time of 9/11. Not to mention the cognitive dissonance, for someone my age, of hordes of college students displaying fervent patriotism. I realize the contexts are vastly different, but I find it hard to imagine ANYTHING happening in the 1970s that would have prompted college students to spontaneously gather in front of the White House cheering and chanting "USA!"

Does anyone really think that Osama bin Laden's death will make a difference in the so-called War on Terror? The forces he unleashed have gone way beyond him now. Terrorists don't need his orders to prompt or organize their movements. And, as reflected in the extra security measures now being taken around the world, there's a good chance that his killing will only spark more anti-American violence.

(Astute readers will have noticed by this point that the subject of this post has nothing to do with the ostensible themes of this blog. But hey, it's my blog and I suppose it's my prerogative to violate my self-imposed parameters once in  a while.)

Aside from that, it strikes me as unseemly to rejoice at anyone's death, no matter how evil a monster he or she was. (And yes, to answer the inevitable question, that would include Hitler.) The only voice I've found in this morning's news coverage that echoes my own feelings belongs to Harry Waizer, identified in the New York Times as a World Trade Center survivor. Asked by a Times reporter for his reaction, Waizer "paused nearly a minute before he began to speak." Waizer was in an elevator at the World Trade Center when the plane struck the building and suffered third-degree burns.

"If this means there is one less death in the future, then I'm glad for that," Waizer said. "But I just can't find it in me to be glad one more person is dead, even if it is Osama bin Laden."

If Waizer is able to extend the definition of humanity to include the man who nearly killed him, I wonder why it should be so hard for the rest of us.

Pandering to the Masses, Then and Now

Journalism, it is said, is in decline. And one proof being offered is a trend towards deciding which stories to cover based not on what editors think is important, but rather on what readers want to read--which is to be determined by what they're searching for online.

The subject came up in a recent, and rather testy, interview with Arianna Huffington that appeared in the Sunday Times Magazine. The interviewer asked Huffington about an internal AOL memo, leaked shortly before AOL acquired the Huffington Post, saying that AOL wanted "95 percent of stories to be written based on what people are searching for." (Huffington protested that she shouldn't have to defend a memo that predated AOL's acquisition of her website, and said that the document was "very, very, very far away in terms of where the company is now.")

Obviously, journalism based on what people are searching for can leave much to be desired. We could end up with, say, a bunch of stories about Lindsay Lohan's latest escapades instead of a searching analysis of what's going on at Guantanamo. Or a lot of media coverage about the supposed falsity of President Obama's birth certificate instead of a serious examination of what to do about the economy. Oh, wait a minute: that IS what we've ended up with.

But say what you will about the state of American journalism (and there is indeed much to bemoan), this trend isn't exactly new. I've been spending a lot of time lately paging through a magazine that was published in 1807 (I'm researching a novel based on the life of the woman who edited it), and--what do you know?--the same issue, more or less, existed some 200 years ago.

For example: the magazine, which was called The Observer, began serializing a translation of a French novel called Adelaide; Or, a Lesson for Lovers. I'm not sure what the "lesson" was supposed to be, but by the standards of 1807 the novel was pretty racy. It's about a couple of horny teenagers who can't wait for the sanction of matrimony (or perhaps there was parental opposition to the match--I haven't read every word). They do what comes naturally, she gets pregnant ... you get the idea. Not too spicy by modern standards, perhaps, but it apparently caused a good deal of outraged comment in Baltimore in 1807.

Somewhat belatedly, the magazine's editor--Eliza Anderson--decided to stop the serialization. Once she had seen the novel in its entirety, she said, she realized it was "too glowing, too impure, to be presented by a female, to the chaste eye of female modesty." But lo and behold, the public--or at least the segment of it that wasn't outraged by the novel's publication--was outraged by its discontinuation. "Whilst some extracts we have made, from the most valuable works, are passed by," Anderson complained, "this love-tale excites the liveliest interest, and when its publication has been suspended for a week, the office door has not stood still a moment, for the constant, the continual enquiries that were made, to know when it would be continued."

It's hard to tell if Anderson herself was genuinely outraged by the "glowing" and "impure" nature of Adelaide. For one thing, later in 1807 she herself translated another French novel that may have been even racier--according to a modern scholar, it contained perhaps "the first depiction of female orgasm in polite fiction."

For another, she was pretty sensitive to what kinds of articles sold magazines. In fact, she started The Observer because its predecessor publication, for which she also wrote, was too dull. Anderson thought satire was the way to go--partly because she thought that was the best way to reform and mold people, and partly because she thought it made for a livelier publication.

She was right about the liveliness, but she ended up alienating quite a few people through her satire. On the other hand, as she recognized, the journalistic feuds that were fought out in the pages of The Observer and other publications actually had a salutary effect on sales. She noted at one point that subscriptions reached a sustainable level only after "some strokes of satire and criticism had given zest and interest to our pages."

But Anderson didn't just publish what she thought the public wanted to hear--not by a long shot. She never lost sight of her original goal, which was to educate and elevate the reading public of Baltimore, whether they wanted to be educated and elevated or not. So, alongside Adelaide and other fluffier offerings there were dense biographical tracts on Marmontel and Lord Mansfield and analyses of the contemporary political scene in Europe--the very "valuable works," no doubt, that avid readers of Adelaide were passing by. Not to mention a lot of digs at the follies and foibles of the Baltimore citizenry.

Perhaps the moral here, if there is one, is that successful journalism has always been some kind of balancing act between what readers want and what editors, and writers, think they should want. The Internet has obviously made it easier to identify readers' less-than-elevated interests and pander to them, but the basic issue remains the same. The trick, it seems, is to somehow present serious, thoughtful journalism in a guise that will appeal to the masses.

Maybe in another 200 years someone will figure out how to do that.

Rip Van Winkle at the Library of Congress

There's nothing like a trip to the Library of Congress to lift my spirits--and to induce me to ponder the upsides and downsides of modern technology.

For those who have never experienced its delights, let me explain that the Library of Congress--and in particular the august Main Reading Room--is a shrine to that now almost obsolete format (or should I say "platform"?), The Book. The high-domed reading room is adorned with such a profusion of ornate marble and imposing allegorical figures representing all things book-related that it can sometimes be hard to concentrate on the actual, usually rather modest-looking, book in front of you.

But the Library's collection is far from modest. It's basically everything that's ever been published in this country, and a lot that's been published outside it--plus unpublished letters, diaries, maps, drawings. You name it. All brought to you on a silver platter (metaphorically speaking) a mere 30 to 90 minutes after you fill out a call slip with one of those tiny eraserless pencils otherwise reserved for keeping score in miniature golf. And all this for free--or rather, paid for by tax dollars. For my money, it's tax revenue well spent.

But as to technology: yesterday I had an experience in the Reading Room that illustrated the ways in which old-fashioned book-related research methods can lead to serendipitous discoveries. I had requested a scholarly article on the Baltimore Almshouse, which I thought might be relevant to the novel I'm now researching (one of my characters is based on an early 19th-century Baltimore doctor who tended to the poor). As it turned out, the article dealt with the wrong time period. But in the same bound volume of the scholarly magazine I found another article--on the Baltimore yellow fever epidemic of 1800--that I eagerly realized was right up my alley. I learned that the predicament of the poor during the epidemic led to the founding of the Baltimore Dispensary, where my doctor was a key player.

What does technology have to do with this? Well, if I'd looked at the Almshouse article online--in isolation rather than in a bound volume with other articles--I never would have come across the yellow fever article.

On the other hand ... after reading the yellow fever article I made my way down the hall to the Microform Reading Room, which is something of a letdown after the Main Reading Room. The last time I was there, perhaps a year ago, it looked like a forgotten broom closet that for some reason had been stocked with recalcitrant, creaky microfilm readers. It still looks like a broom closet, but the old microfilm readers have now been banished to a back room (and the back room of a broom closet is a pretty ignominious place to be banished). In their place stood sleek little black models perched next to equally sleek computer screens.

A friendly librarian, noting my confusion, explained that the new microfilm readers were actually hooked up to the computers: you viewed the images on the monitors, where you could enlarge or darken them or rotate them with the click of a mouse. Not only that, she told me, you didn't have to copy things the old way: by pressing a button that caused the image to be temporarily sucked into the bowels of the microfilm reader, only to emerge as an often illegible hard copy at twenty-five cents a pop. Now you could simply copy the images to a flash drive, take them back home, and insert them into your own computer.

Of course, being a female version of Rip Van Winkle, I hadn't thought to bring a flash drive. But the gift shop stocks them, apparently for hapless souls like myself. I was happy to fork over the somewhat exorbitant price of fifteen bucks--not that bad, really, when you consider the flash drive is a lovely shade of blue and doubles as a souvenir, since it's emblazoned with the words "Library of Congress." After the librarian gave me a crash tutorial in using the newfangled equipment, I spent a few joyful hours stalking, and saving, my microfilmed quarry: The Observer, an obscure weekly magazine published in Baltimore during the year 1807 and edited by Eliza Anderson--the first woman to edit a magazine in the United States and one of the main characters in my novel.

How happy did this make me? I can't even begin to tell you. When I started researching Eliza, I had to transport myself to the Maryland Historical Society library in Baltimore to read the magazine in bound volume form. Oh, they had it on microfilm, but the copier function had ceased working at some undetermined time in the past, and there was no money to fix it. I couldn't even xerox the hard copy pages of the magazine because they were too fragile. Nor could I even use a pen to take notes, because only pencils were allowed in the library. So I spent many hours taking notes on the articles with an increasingly dull pencil (the library did provide an electronic sharpener, which would periodically pierce the silence), and sometimes copying them word for word. Let's just say it was a bit tedious.

Imagine my joy when I discovered that the microfilm was also available just a Metro ride away from my house in Washington DC at the Library of Congress--where they had an actual working microfilm copier, albeit a cranky one. What I really dreamed of, though, was a way of having access to every page of every issue of the magazine at home, so that I could draw on them at leisure in writing the novel. It was hard to predict which pages I would need and therefore which I should copy, but it would have cost a fortune--and taken untold hours--to copy them all. And the idea of buying the reel of microfilm and a cranky microfilm reader of my own crossed my mind, but I quickly dismissed it as unrealistic. Clearly, there was no way my dream would ever come true.

Until now, that is--just a year later. It will take a while, but I can copy every single page of The Observer onto my flash drive and install them on my computer. I'm amazed. But my amazement is nothing compared to what Eliza Anderson would experience if she were to be revived and told that all 52 issues of her magazine--the publication she sweated and slaved over for many hours each week, the source of so much joy and angst, the means by which she made her minor mark on history--could be easily contained within a bright blue object that's only two inches long.

The Agony of Age

I haven't written for a while, mostly because my 87-year-old mother, who suffers from dementia and cataracts, has broken her right leg for the second time in four months and is now recovering from major surgery. All of which has led me to think about (among other things) the indignities and unpleasantnesses of hospitalization, then and now.

By "then" I mean, of course, about 200 years ago -- the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the period I researched for my first novel, A More Obedient Wife, and that I'm currently researching for my novel-in-progress. Because one of the characters in the current novel (based on a real historical figure) is a doctor, I've been reading up on the history of medicine.

As with so many things about the past, the more you know about medicine back then, the luckier you feel to be alive now. Sure, things go wrong in modern hospitals: no one tells you the doctor you've been waiting for for two hours has decided not to come after all; the nurse takes forever to answer an urgent call for help; what seems like a steady stream of people invade your room and ask you the same questions over and over again. Even my mother, who has trouble remembering what happened five minutes ago, can tell that she's been asked these same question many times before -- and to show her annoyance she often refuses to answer, which doesn't help matters any.

But at least she doesn't lose all access to food the next day, which is what might have happened to an uncooperative patient in the 18th century. According to a book on 18th-century medicine, appropriately entitled The Age of Agony, patients at London's Guy's Hospital who engaged in cursing or swearing, or were "found guilty of any Indecency, or commit any Nuisance," were to lose "their next Day's Diet."

Not that their "next Day's Diet" was liable to be all that enticing. My mother has a menu of food choices from "room service" that she finds overwhelming -- or would find overwhelming if she could see well enough to read it. Maybe the hospital kitchen wouldn't win any stars from Michelin, but at least there's more variety than was to be found at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, where the menu was restricted to bread, boiled beef, "milk pottage," and beef broth. On the other hand, each patient also received a daily allotment of a pint of "Ale Cawdle" at night and three pints of beer. That might have made things a little more tolerable. Nevertheless, patients at Guy's and other hospitals routinely slipped out to nearby "Publick-Houses" and "Brandy Shops" and came back to the wards drunk. As a result of which they forfeited "their next Day's Diet," which was apparently an all-purpose disciplinary measure.

You can kind of understand the patients slipping away to get drunk when you consider that there wasn't much for them to do in the hospital. No TV, certainly, which is the only thing that seems to keep my mother's mind off her pain and relieve her of her general disorientation (she always finds comfort in the world of Turner Classic Movies). In some hospitals there was group Bible-reading on Sunday evenings, led by "some sober Person in each Ward" (assuming, I suppose, they could find one), but not much else in the way of entertainment. Patients at Guy's who were able-bodied were kept busy taking care of the weaker patients and helping to clean the wards and fetch coals. If they shirked those duties -- well, you can probably guess the punishment. But for a second offense they would actually be discharged from the hospital.

Not to mention that there was very little the hospital could do for you, other than warehouse and feed you. In fact, a hospital was likely to make you even sicker than you were when you came in, given that -- before the advent of germ theory -- you would be kept in close proximity to all sorts of pathogenic organisms harbored by your fellow patients. Other drawbacks included the noxious smells from the lack of sanitation and the intense discomfort due to infestations of lice. In 1765 a surgeon at Guy's remarked that in London hospitals "bugs are frequently a greater evil to the patient than the malady for which he seeks an hospital." No wonder hospitals were reserved for the poor. Wealthy invalids preferred to do their suffering at home.

I suppose all of this should make me feel much more appreciative of the modern comforts and conveniences at my mother's disposal. But it's a sad truth that no matter how much we understand, on an intellectual level, that we're really a lot better off than many others -- including those who lived in the past -- it's our present distress that looms larger in our consciousness. Should I tell my mother she should feel lucky that her hospital bed isn't full of lice -- or that she has a private toilet, even though at the moment there's no way she can get to it? It would probably only add to her general confusion.

The truth is, two hundred years ago my mother and many of the other elderly inmates of the rehabilitation facility where she is currently housed wouldn't have lived long enough to suffer the ailments of old age. Their lives would have ended before their bones grew so brittle and their eyes so dim. We can thank modern medicine for that. And sometimes, I suppose, we can also curse it.

Et in Stoppard's Arcadia Ego

I recently had the thoroughly enjoyable experience of seeing the current Broadway production of Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia, and I would encourage everyone who can to go and do likewise.

There are so many different things going on in this brilliant play that everyone who sees it is likely to latch onto something different (and I would highly recommend reading the play beforehand so that you have a better chance of following all the various strands). No doubt a physicist or a mathematician would be entranced by the scientific angles in the play. But as someone who has spent a fair amount of time parsing fragmentary 200-year-old documents and trying to reconstruct from them what actually happened in the past, the aspect of the play that really grabbed me was the historiographical one: two characters who are 20th-century historians tangling over just what happened at an English country estate in the early 1800's. (I say "20th-century" simply because the play was written in 1993, but of course they could just as easily be 21st-century historians--the study of history hasn't changed significantly in the last 18 years, and perhaps it never will.)

Stoppard's conceit is that the play alternates between two time periods: 1809 and a few years later, on the one hand; and the present (more or less), when descendants of the estate's 19th-century inhabitants still live in the house and are hosting the two historians who are doing their research there. The audience is in the privileged position of seeing both what really happened in 1809, and what the historians think happened--rightly or wrongly.

It's a delicious position to be in, and one that reveals the human psychology at work behind historical endeavor. We all want answers, we want certainty--or as close to certainty as we can get. And so, presented with bits and pieces of information, we construct a story that makes sense to us--a story that often requires making certain assumptions.

One of the historians, Bernard, decides that the subject of his own expertise--Lord Byron--must have been a guest at the house in 1809. After all, he lived not far away, and he was a schoolfellow and (presumably) friend of the resident tutor there, Septimus Hodge. Makes sense, doesn't it? Well, yes--and he turns out to be correct on those points.

But Bernard goes on to deduce that while staying at the house, Byron fought a duel with another guest there--a minor poet whose work he had (presumably) savaged in print and whose wife he had (presumably) seduced. And that leads him to another deduction: in the duel Byron murdered the poet, who is not heard from thereafter, and had to flee the country. This story provides a convenient explanation for Byron's otherwise puzzling voyage to Lisbon that year, at a time when Europe was ravaged by war and travel was risky.

Makes sense, doesn't it? Well, yes--and it also makes headlines and gets Bernard on the morning TV talk shows. The only problem is--as the audience knows and as the other historian in the play maintains--Bernard gets this part of the story all wrong.

In the play, Bernard later comes across evidence that disproves the central element of his theory, the murder, much to his dismay. But in reality--as anyone who has worked extensively with primary historical sources knows--these kinds of mistakes often get perpetuated for generations in secondary sources.

To offer a minor example, in the course of researching my novel A More Obedient Wife, I read what was then (and, I think, now) the leading biography of one of the historical figures I was writing about, James Wilson, an early Supreme Court Justice. According to this biography, shortly after Wilson married his second wife he freed a slave he owned. The author also mentioned in passing, without any citation, that this second wife was a Quaker and had undoubtedly urged her new husband to free the slave, in keeping with her abolitionist views.

A good story, I thought. And it makes sense, right? But as they used to say during the Cold War, "trust, but verify." I managed to find the document granting the slave his freedom, dated shortly after the marriage, so that checked out. But nowhere, in any primary source, could I find any evidence that the second wife was a Quaker, or that she had anything to do with freeing the slave. And I'm pretty sure I found every primary source relating to the second wife, Hannah Gray Wilson, who was one of my two main characters.

What I did find, however, were repetitions of the assertion that she was a Quaker in at least two later secondary sources. Which is understandable. After all, we're conditioned to believe what reputable historians say, especially if it seems to make sense. (Although I have to admit that this particular biography, written in the mid-1950's, raised all sorts of red flags for me despite its iconic status. The author--Charles Page Smith--kept putting in details like, "As he read the letter, his glasses began to slip slowly down his nose." Oh yeah, I wanted to say? How do you know?)

Okay, so sometimes historians get it wrong. Does that mean they should just throw up their hands and give up? Consign certain things to the dustbin of history that's labeled "Unknowable"? Well, they should at least exercise caution--as the more skeptical historian in the play, Hannah, keeps urging (at least when it's her competitor who's the one jumping to conclusions). But as Hannah herself says, it's the search for answers--not its ultimate success or failure--that's important. "It's wanting to know that makes us matter," she says. "Otherwise we're going out the way we came in."

Of course, there's another way to come up with an answer, of sorts--one that accepts the unknowability of the past and just keeps going. I'm talking, of course, about historical fiction, which can provide the satisfaction of a "good story" without distorting (consciously or unconsciously) the historical record.

I decided, for example, that I really liked the idea that James Wilson freed his slave because of pressure from his new wife. It made sense, and it fit in with the story I was weaving. But the idea that she was a Quaker--even aside from the absence of proof--just didn't make any sense to me. She was from a fairly elite family in Boston, a stronghold of Congregationalism, and I even have a reference to the church her family attended. (It was called "Dr. Thatcher's Meeting," after the name of the pastor. Actually, this may have been where Smith got the idea that she was a Quaker--today we use "meeting" to refer to Quaker congregations. But in 18th-century New England, the term was used to refer to Congregationalist churches as well.) So I made her an abolitionist, but not a Quaker.

So historical fiction has its uses, and its satisfactions. But it's no substitute for straight-ahead, just-the-facts-ma'am history. When I put on my historian hat, I try to rein in my imagination and retain a healthy skepticism. As Arcadia shows us so wittily, it's not always easy--and maybe it's not always possible. Sometimes I may be more like Bernard than I'd like to admit. But the sad truth is that there are some gaps in the historical record that only fiction--clearly labeled as such--can fill.