For the next few weeks, I’m going to write about good books that I’ve read recently. I read a bunch of different kinds of books, so this will be an eclectic series.
The first one I want to tell you about is The Frozen River, by Ariel Lawhon.
I first heard of this book over Christmas, when a family member told me her book club was reading it. When she told me about it, I realized that I already knew a little about this story, so I decided to read the book. Here’s the backstory.
When I was doing a graduate program in American History at George Mason University in the 1990s, one of my assigned readings was A Midwife’s Tale by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (the 85-year-old 300th Anniversary University Professor emerita at Harvard University). This in turn was based on the diary kept by Martha Ballard, who was a healer and midwife who lived and worked on the remote northern frontier of Maine between 1785 and 1812.
Ulrich encountered Martha Ballard’s diary in a circuitous fashion. Martha’s diary was passed to her daughter Dolly Lombard after Martha’s death. After Dolly died, it went to her two daughters (Sarah and Hannah) who passed it on to Martha’s 2nd great-granddaughter, Mary Hobart, one of the first female US physicians to graduate from the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in 1884, the same year that she received the diary. Martha is also the great-aunt of Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross. Her medical legacy to the United States is noteworthy.
In 1930, Hobart donated the diary to the Maine State Library in Augusta, which promised Hobart a transcript of the diary. This never happened. Several other historians played a role in publicizing this diary before it was fully transcribed and made available online and in hardcopy in 1992.
Meanwhile, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich had become aware of this diary; but instead of dismissing it as repetitive and ordinary, Ulrich saw the potential in the diary as an avenue for understanding the lives of women in New England. These women were frequently absent from the official records, as they could not own property or participate in legal affairs. However, they were often an important part of the web of community that functions on the frontier, and Ulrich used A Midwife’s Tale to pull these strands together and tell Martha’s story. This book won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1991.
In 1997, the PBS series The American Experience aired A Midwife's Tale on PBS. This documentary film was based on Ulrich’s book, and Ulrich served as a consultant, script collaborator, and narrator for the film.
Now let’s fast-forward to 2023, when Ariel Lawhon published The Frozen River. In the Author’s Note at the end of the book (which she says you shouldn’t read until you’ve read the book because it contains spoilers), she talks about how she used Martha’s original diary and A Midwife’s Tale to craft a murder mystery set on the Maine frontier in 1791. I found this note fascinating; Lawhon carefully delineated fact from fiction in her book, explaining the dramatic choices she had made to create a tighter story while remaining true to the major elements of Martha’s life.
I first read A Midwife’s Tale when it was assigned reading in my 1995 course, and had reread it in 2016 or so after I realized that some of my Arnold family ancestors lived in Maine at precisely the time of Martha’s diary. The valley she lived in was one mountain range to the west of where my ancestors lived, so the life she lived must have been very similar to what my ancestors experienced. I have found historical fiction to be a good avenue for understanding an era in history. Writers of historical fiction are fanatical about the historical basis of their stories; Lawhon illustrates this with her detailed notes about the decisions she made as she wrote her book.
At the end of the Author’s Note, Lawhon includes these lines from A Midwife’s Tale:
Martha Ballard ensured that she would not be forgotten. There was nothing in Christian tradition that said a midwife ought to keep a diary…. For some complex of reasons, probably unknown even to her, Martha felt an intense need to re-create her own life day by day…. She not only documented her prayers, her lost sleep, her deeds of charity and compassion, she savored and wrote down the petty struggles and small graces of ordinary life. The diary is a selective record, shaped by her need to justify and understand her life, yet is also a remarkably honest one…[it] tells us that Martha was a devout Christian and humble nurse whose intelligence sometimes made it difficult for her to attend church or defer to her town’s physicians, a loving mother, a gentle woman with a sense of duty and an anatomical curiosity that allowed her to observe autopsies as well as cry over the dead, a courageous woman who never quite learned to stay on her horse, a sharp-eyed and practical woman who kept faith in ultimate justice…. Outside her own diary, Martha has no history. No independent record of her work survives. It is her husband’s name, not hers, that appears in censuses, tax lists, and merchant accounts for her town…. Nor does any extant record acknowledge the testimony she took from unwed mothers in delivery. Her name appears on a list of witnesses at the North rape trial, but no one, except her, preserved a record of what was said…. Martha did not leave a farm, but a life, recorded patiently and consistently for twenty-seven years. No gravestone bears her name though perhaps there still grow clumps of chamomile or feverfew escaped from her garden.
Lawhon, Ariel. The Frozen River: A Novel (pp. 425-426). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
This is what the study of history is all about. First and foremost, historians seek historical records – the essential primary sources. Then they make this record available to other historians and history buffs through an academically grounded analysis – the secondary sources that are intended to be read by other historians and by the interested public. Other writers of both history and fiction discover the stories embedded in this research and then write about them (in what are sometimes called tertiary sources), frequently fictionalizing or embellishing the account in order to tell the story more effectively. This allows wider swaths of readers to encounter them and learn the history they contain. And then book clubs decide to read them together and talk about them.
The Frozen River was a Good Morning America Book Club pick and was named an NPR Book of the Year. It has become such a favorite of book clubs that you can find book club discussion questions on this website.
I love everything about this.
This book was recommended to me just yesterday, so it's on my list. You might like "Have You Heard about Kitty Karr". Don't want to give it away, so will just say it's "social history" of the U.S. 1950's to present. Not my usual choice, but it was excellent.
Was pleased that you (whom I consider an historian) read historical fiction to learn about a period. When I realized how completely lacking I am in the history of both WWI and WWII I started reading novels - mostly about the lives of women. Whenever I come across an event that's new I go to that source of all knowledge - Wikipedia! - and so far have always found it was true, so I have actually learned a lot. I think there is no rule about learning from fiction. I assume that the author has done the research for me.
I’ve heard about this book. I’ll recommend it to my book club (Jeannette’s old bk club).. I just finished reading Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrick Backman. I love his storytelling. A Man Called Ove....He’s Swedish. He is a novelist. And I’m just starting Dave Grohl the Storyteller. An autobiography. He is founder of Foo Fighters and was drummer for Nirvana. Kinda out of my league, but since I just read Daisy Jones and the Six, it fits in with my unassigned 2024 course in fantasy rock bands and actual ones! 🤣😂