I have never reflected much on how being an historian, my earliest adult ambition, could be like being an accountant, the back-up plan I devised, given how dicey becoming an historian is, until I read this piece by Megan Marshall. Megan Marshall’s recently released Margaret Fuller – A New American Life is getting great reviews. I can’t review it for a couple of reasons. Putting aside my common “Dammit Jim, I’m a tax blogger”, there is the fact that I haven’t read it – yet. It is on my kindle though and I will be buying a hardcover version that I am hoping Ms. Marshall will autograph when she visits Concord soon. The other thing is that in order to properly review it you really have to compare it to the other Margaret Fuller biographies and I have only read maybe four of them and what I got from one or the other is totally scrambled in my brain. I don’t understand how the reviewers pull it off.
Margaret Who ?
I’m always amazed at how unfamiliar Margaret Fuller is to many people. When she died in a tragic shipwreck off Fire Island in 1850, she may have been the most famous woman in the United States. She was coming back from Italy with her much younger husband, who had been a soldier in the service of the briefly lived Roman Republic, and their two year old son. All three of them were lost as was the manuscript of her history of the Republic. Ralph Waldo Emerson dispatched Henry David Thoreau to search for any of her papers that might have survived.
She was the inspiration for a generation of activists. Although she was in Europe, when the Seneca Falls Convention was held and the first national women’s right convention was held in Worcester a few months after her death, her presence must have been felt at both. Her “Woman in the Nineteenth Century” is the foundational work of American feminism. There is a lot more packed into her forty years though. Meg McGarvan Murray summed it up best in Margaret Fuller – Wandering Pilgrim when she wrote “Perhaps Fuller’s lasting literary masterpiece is her extraordinary life story”.
And This Is Like Public Accounting Because ?
In her New York Times piece. Ms. Marshall relates what it is like to have a book at the publisher and then discover a new document that might change some of its conclusions. It happened to her on both the Fuller work and her biography of the Peabody Sisters, on which she spent two decades. The letter relative to Fuller, written by Emerson, included a list of the items that Thoreau found as he was surveying the wreckage. Ms. Marshall was relieved to find that she did not have to do a major rewrite.
The beauty of this letter was that the truth of what I already knew was getting, if it’s possible, even truer — my subjects’ quirks and predilections underscored in these inky words. In the end, I changed little in my book.
For many years I have only done tax work, but early in my career I also audited financial statements. The statements and to some extent even returns are narratives supported by evidence. There was always the dread that when you were close to crossing the goal line, a new piece of evidence would arise to upset things. The attorney’s response to the audit inquiry letter, the only thing holding up the job, would have something in it. The review of subsequent disbursements would show material items being paid late. Same thing happens with tax returns as the clients send you a K-1 that they have misplaced or all of sudden get serious about looking for deductible items, when they learn they have a balance due.
Of course it is very different in many ways. Having spent thirty years recording my time in 15 minute intervals, the concept of a project extending over two decades is mind boggling.
Where’s The Movie ?
Margaret Fuller’s story is probably one of the most tragically romantic real life stories in American history. It is a great narrative of female empowerment with a war and a shipwreck thrown in at the end. Perfect movie for date night. It’s too bad that Meryl Streep is a little old for the role (Fuller was only 40 when she died.) Maybe Julia Roberts. I keep hoping.
You can follow me on twitter @peterreillycpa.
Originally published on Forbes.com Mar 25th, 2013