Author: Wallace Stegner
Published: March 1, 1971
Genre(s): Historical Fiction
Page Count: 632
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:An iconic novel of the West and an American masterpiece—a deeply moving narrative of one family and the traditions of our national past.
Lyman Ward is a retired professor of history, recently confined to a wheelchair by a crippling bone disease and dependent on others for his every need. Amid the chaos of 1970s counterculture he retreats to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, to write the biography of his grandmother: an elegant and headstrong artist and pioneer who, together with her engineer husband, made her own journey through the hardscrabble West nearly a hundred years before. In discovering her story he excavates his own, probing the shadows of his experience and the America that has come of age around him.
To consider this book out of context is only to get fractions of the whole picture. Without context, Angle of Repose, which won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is an interesting, well-written, and thought-provoking—if rather problematic—novel. But this is only if you read the book as an isolated object and know nothing about the author and his source material.
Because to put it quite bluntly, Wallace Stegner lifted the majority of his story wholesale from (and without giving credit to) the then-unpublished memoirs of Mary Hallock Foote. Angle of Repose is, in a word, plagiarized. Some would argue that this falls into an ethical gray area, and perhaps the case could be argued from that position (and has been). However, it is my belief that when you create a “fictional” character whose life is rooted so deeply in the life of a real person that it’s hard to distinguish between the two, when you quote, word for word, from that person’s memoirs without proper citation…I believe that is ethically wrong.
Wallace Stegner claimed that Mary Hallock Foote wasn’t “interesting enough” to write a biography about, that by creating her fictional counterpart, Susan Ward, he made her “immortal”. He, a White man, improved upon the life one of the most recognized and celebrated American woman writers/artists of the latter 19th century. It’s strange, then, isn’t it, that the only “improvements” Stegner made upon Mary Hallock Foote’s life chronology were to A) provide a middle-aged White grandson character to “interpret” his grandmother’s life, and B) to invent a scenario in which Susan Ward has an affair and is directly responsible for the death of her youngest daughter. So, according to Stegner, what Mary Hallock Foote really needed was an anti-feminist, disdainful man to tell her what her problem was, and she needed to have the most melodramatic, ridiculous tragedy happen to her. (The quality in prose and storytelling between what Stegner plagiarized and what was entirely invented is quite marked—the former is infinitely better.)
Yet other than this, Stegner made no changes from Mary Hallock Foote’s memoirs, often not changing the names, often putting Foote’s own letters into the novel and passing them off as ones written by the “fictional” Susan Ward.
But in the end, though 80% of the book is about Susan Ward and her life in the 19th century, what Angle of Repose is really about it Lyman, the pretentious, curmudgeonly grandson. Stegner has stolen a real woman’s life and words in order to support the character arc of a man (who claims to be so much wiser and better than her). Mary Hallock Foote has not only been plagiarized, she’s been turned into a narrative tool to serve a probably misogynistic author and his definitely anti-feminist narrator.
From where I sit, this issue does not fall into a gray area; it’s wrong, and no matter how well-written or greatly-awarded Angle of Repose is, it’s despicable.