Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War by Karen Abbott
436 pages
Published 2014
Read from March 18 to March 22
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Historical biography is a different animal than capital-H History, a clade intermediate between history and historical fiction. Both history and historical biography have their worth and their points of interest. History (or at least history the way I like it) reports on its own uncertainties and the contradictions between sources, underlining when an interpretation is speculative or a historical source potentially unreliable -- not all historians are meticulous on this point, but the good ones are. Historical biography, on the other hand, goes all-in for scene-setting and detail, drawing sights and smells from various sources, inferring thoughts and states of mind from correspondence and subsequent memoirs when available, frequently approaching the narrative as an experiential third-person-limited point of view. Abbott refers to her "characters" in the acknowledgements, and in general is obviously trying to tell stories to their best effect. Historical biographies, the good ones, can be fully scrupulous about primary sources -- unlike certain chauvinist reviewers, I see no reason to suspect that Abbott faked details or indulged in "women's magazine" frippery, whatever the hell that might even mean in this context. But it is definitely a distinct genre of historical writing, with its own style and its own storytelling expectations.
That's all very broad and open-ended, of course. Basically I'm writing down whatever thoughts occur to me, because I'm too distracted to write a review engaging directly with the book's content in any meaningful way. Not that engaging with content is a habit of mine in this space, but it's more acute these days, for Life Reasons that I won't get into here.
More broad commentary: The American Civil War is fascinating in a dispiriting way, because it never really went away, as any number of bumper stickers and totally-not-racist Tea Party rallies will show you. Likewise, I'm always fascinated by the women who get left out of history books (which is to say, basically all of them), and their various means of asserting agency and articulating with their society. Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy exhibits a good (if small) sample of these stories, or "characters" if you will, each with distinct motives and methods of operation. It's a good (if preliminary) look into a part of history wholly unfamiliar to me, which is all I can ask for.
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