Book Review: ‘After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart,’ by Megan Marshall

Small wonder, the right-handed daughter grasps later in the left-handed essay, that “when I began to write, I found myself attracted to almosts, to might-have-beens, to compromise — so often woman’s story.”

Marshall is moved to consider the “material turn” in the history profession away from documents like diaries and letters, like the many she sifted through when writing about the Transcendentalists, and toward objects. This, the theory goes, helps to resurrect the narratives of people who were illiterate or not considered important enough for archives. (It’s what archaeologists have long done.)

Approached by a reader, she pays $300 — a bargain, factoring in inflation — for an early-19th-century Honduran mahogany “writing box” with a secret drawer, almost certainly shared by Elizabeth and Mary Peabody, and marvels at the dimensionality it gives to the words she has already set down about the sisters. (Will future scholars likely fetishize our own glowing “writing boxes,” these laptop computers with their busted “S” keys and crumbs in the crevices? Hard to say.)

Like decorating a house, Marshall suggests with this book, the act of crafting a biography is never really finished, and certain odds and ends can be hard to clean up. There’s an old-fashioned jump scare when she peers into the coffin of Una Hawthorne, the oldest child of Sophia Peabody and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who inspired the character of Pearl in “The Scarlet Letter.” Her hair was supposed to be white from heartbreak, but, Marshall reports, instead is “deep rusty red.” She spends some time retracing steps in her attempt to find out why.

“That was the lesson of looking inside the coffin,” she writes. “There are a few things we can know for sure: a patch of cloth, a fragment of bone, a red braid. And then there are the questions we can’t answer.”

AFTER LIVES: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart | By Megan Marshall | Mariner Books | 208 pp. | $29.99