The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton (35 page)

N
ew England history has been a long-time fascination for me, especially the seventeenth century (the setting for
The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin
) and the antebellum decades of our early Republic—the setting for
The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton.
Allegra's adventures (from 1837 to 1850) provide a glimpse through her eyes into that heyday of Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Stowe; that “yeasty time” of transcendentalism, abolitionism, and women's rights; that moment when the American landscape and culture began to change under the influences of the industrial revolution.

While casting about for another ticket to the foreign country of the past, I stumbled upon two traditions that engaged my imagination. First was the tradition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors who created the female picaresque; second was the tradition of those American itinerant portrait painters who went on the road to make their living by wit, risk, and rough skill. I found that only about a dozen of these adventurous, painting souls had been women, while there were scores of men who had tried their “primitive” hands. Some few had ambitions to become fine artists. I soon discovered that I was in for about four years of living, so to speak, in early nineteenth-century America, just as I had once lived for three years on the New England frontier in the seventeenth. My own adventure into those early years of “Victorian America” completed, I've come home again to Newfields, NH, and the twentieth century. But my hope is that the intrepid reader will be engaged by the journey back as much as I was.