Reviews of Books

The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton, a historical novel set in the 1830s and 1840s, relates the exploits of an unconventional young widow who attains economic independence and geographical freedom as an itinerant portrait artist. Along the way, the beautiful Mrs. Fullerton also acquires a fair degree of sexual freedom. Robert J. Begiebing's novel makes for a great vacation read for early American historians, and it also provokes interesting comparisons of the crafts of writing fiction and writing history. Historians working in the narrative genre also labor to create a believable past and breathe life into resurrected characters. How does the fiction writer's act of historical imagination differ from that of the historian?	1
Begiebing, a professor of English at New Hampshire College, previously published The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin (Chapel Hill, 1991), a novel based on an actual murder in seventeenth-century New Hampshire. Allegra Fullerton has no specific historical referent, but antebellum specialists will have fun identifying the familiar people, events, and intellectual currents the author has appropriated. Begiebing has clearly done his homework, aided by a fellowship stint at that great repository, the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester, Massachusetts.	2
The conceit of the book is that a retired scholar has discovered an old manuscript, along with sketchbooks and art supplies, moldering in an unopened box in a local historical society in Massachusetts. The manuscript, an episodic, first-person narrative by Allegra Fullerton, is bundled with a rejection slip from a censorious editor at Ticknor and Fields (an actual Boston publishing firm), who complains that the manuscript is too frank, too revelatory. The unwomanly independence of the main character is scandalous, the insertion of well-known individuals into the plot ill-advised, the editor writes. Of course, what guaranteed rejection in the 1850s (at least by Ticknor and Fields) is tame by today's standards, and the elderly scholar arranges for publication, merely modernizing punctuation and spelling.	3
Except for the hint provided by the art supplies in the box, Begiebing shrewdly never clarifies whether we are to take Fullerton's narrative as a "true story" of a woman's life or whether the manuscript could instead be something a risqué nineteenth-century author concocted. Either way, he is right in step with the literary productions he is imitating, many of which deliberately blurred the line between fact and fiction.	4
In many respects, Allegra Fullerton is a plausible "true" character for her day. Although uncommon, traveling women artists did exist, among them the folk limner Ruth Henshaw Bascom, whose decades of diaries are in the AAS collections. At least one woman artist invites speculation about her sexual intimacies outside the confines of marriage: in 1828, Boston portraitist Sarah Goodridge painted a miniature (2.5 x 3 inches) of just her naked breasts framed by gauze as a present for her very dear friend Senator Daniel Webster. Allegra Fullerton, like Goodridge, is a woman willing to reveal her body. Her status as a youthful widow enhances the likelihood that she would embrace a life with sexual passion and experience.	. . .