The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton: Or, a Memoir of Startling and Amusing Episodes from Itinerant Life--A Novel

by Robert J. Begiebing

Book Overview

Robert J. Begiebing's first novel, The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin, was hailed by Annie Proulx in the New York Times Book Review as "a striking and original work by a gifted writer with an... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 158465211X
• ISBN13: 9781584652113
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: University Press of New England
• Length: 334 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.1" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

The History is Stronger than the Fiction

If you enjoy visiting the 19th century and appreciate authors who get things right, you'll enjoy this book.The author has done a workmanlike job of recreating New England and Italy in the 1840s. There are guest appearances by Ruskin, Margaret Fuller, and visit to a historically accurate idealistic community. You'll learn a lot about the world of American artists in this period too.Unfortunately, I found this novel weak as a novel. Though the plot provides a lot of opportunity to show us conflict, resolution, and character development most of the action takes place offstage. Allegra's personality is static. Though she writes in a first person voice she displays little or no hint of internal emotional conflicts despite a life filled with moral and ethical problems of the sort that would have generated 100s of pages of agonized reflections in the work of her mentor, Margaret Fuller, or, indeed, that of any other woman of her period. Allegra described illicit sex so matter of factly that my feeling was that the author had imposed a 20th century male personality onto this supposedly 19th century female character. I found it very hard to believe that a woman like Allegra woud so easily blew off a suitor with whom she had had sex--to say nothing of the ease with which she recovers from months of captivity by her would-be rapist, and the way she gets through an adulterous affair with her teacher with only a few tears. Real women, no matter how strong their artistic gifts or dedication might be, go through more than this even now when dealing with such issues. A 19th century woman raised in rural, church-going New England, would have gone through far more.The ending of the novel is disconnected from the story line and is a major deus-ex-machina disappointment which leaves us completely unsatisfied on a dramatic level too. This might be acceptable in a biography but a novel should have a more aesthetic form, starting and ending in places that makes sense in terms of character development and plot climax and resolution.I'd suggest that the author might do better choosing stories with male protagonists, since his outlook and interests seem to me to be so much more male than female. Having slogged through Margeret Fuller's diaries myself, (and those of many other early 19th century women) I've found that the truly interesting thing about these women is how different their mental lives are from ours today. It does them a disservice to paint them as being free of the very strong culturally induced emotional conflicts they had to break through to become the heroic feminists they were.