History isn’t exactly kind to its unusual women. Ambitious female artists, musicians, actors, poets, and entrepreneurs are often excluded from mainstream history books.
Megan Mayhew Bergman’s “Almost Famous Women” (Scribner, $25), a short story collection, consists of thirteen stories, each based on an unusual woman from history. In the afterword of her book, Ms. Bergman writes: “The stories in this collection are born of fascination with real women whose remarkable lives were reduced to footnotes.”
Ms. Bergman’s first book was a collection of stories, “Birds of a Lesser Paradise.” Her stories have been featured in the Best American Short Stories anthology, McSweeney’s and Tin House literary magazines.
And so, up from footnotes and to the main text, Ms. Bergman brings women who didn’t compromise in their quest for true, authentic lives, or shy away from ambition. They lived the kind of lives that might make mainstream history books blush.
In “The Siege at Whale Cay,” Ms. Bergman imagines the life of M.B. “Joe” Carstairs, the muscular British entrepreneur who founded an island resort, raced power boats, and had openly lesbian relations with the likes of Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo.
Each story in the collection stands on its own, yet some stories possess overlapping characters. Carstairs, we learn, is a former World War I ambulance driver and remains traumatized by the experience. Several stories later, we meet Dolly Wilde, cousin and dead-ringer to the famed writer Oscar, who was also drove ambulances and knew Carstairs.
Ms. Bergman also imagines the lives of women who lived in the shadows of their more famous relatives, such as Norma Millay, sister to poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and Allegra Byron, who was the daughter of Romantic poet Lord Byron and his mistress Claire Clairmont.
In “The Autobiography of Allegra Byron,” Ms. Bergman imagines what Allegra might have felt when she was abandoned to be raised by nuns in an orphanage and her father never visited her.
Each story is painstakingly researched, but isn’t afraid to imagine new love interests, desires, and conflicts for its subject matter. In “Who Killed Dolly Wilde?” the narrator looks at the wasted potential of Dolly Wilde and issues this proclamation, which could have been a motto for all the women in the book: “There shouldn’t have been flashes of greatness; there should have been a lifetime of it.”
Despite the fact that Ms. Bergman boldly depicts homosexual desires, drug use, and other actions might challenge a sense of “the norm” and unflinchingly leads readers down some dark paths, I found myself feeling stifled by the predominance of a certain type of woman’s life being the focus of many stories.
Two stories in the collection, “Saving Butterfly McQueen” and “Hell-Diving Women” examine the plight of creative black women, such as Tiny Davis, leader of an all-female fully racially integrated post-World War II swing band. While issues of sexuality form the focus of the collection as a whole, it would have been nice to see even more stories look at history’s unusual women of color.
Many stories in “Almost Famous Women” examine how relationships transform us into different people, so that we are unable to return to our previous lives afterward. Each story is told not from the perspective of the “almost famous” woman in question, but from that of a sympathetic female friend, lover, or family member.
“Almost Famous Women” holds a mirror to the lives of women who struggle to live true to self, but the person holding that mirror has chosen to live a safer, more acceptable, life. Readers get both the daring and the cowardly reflections.
Ms. Bergman has produced a cleverly constructed, honest, and thoughtful book of stories. Fans of historical fiction and biography will find much to delight and ponder in these pages.
Julie Hakim Azzam is an editor and writer (Twitter: @JAzzam)
First Published: February 15, 2015, 5:00 a.m.
