We know people more clearly, understand motives and see how events ramify, as we seldom can in real life. Fictional truth is more shapely and more persuasive than reality. The weakest answer any novelist can ever give is that something was that way and therefore is so transcribed. Of course, claiming an origin in fact does not excuse plots that creak or circumstances that collide with unlikely bangs. The novel begins straightforwardly, "This is the story of Emmeline Mosher, who, before her fourteenth birthday, was sent from her home on a farm in Maine to support her family working in a cotton mill in Massachusetts. In a note, Rossner tells us that the story of Emmeline was told by a woman in Fayette, Maine, old enough to have been a child when Emmeline was an old woman. In Emmeline, Judith Rossner has taken on a plot of high improbable melodrama and come so close to making it believable that the part we cannot swallow scarcely bothers our enjoyment. She is the coauthor of a September 14, 1980
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