Volume 38, Number 7 · April 11, 1991
Two Worlds and Two Wives
By J.H. Elliott
Good Faith and Truthful Ignorance: A Case of Transatlantic Bigamy
by Alexandra Parma Cook, by Noble David Cook
Duke University Press, 206 pp., $21.95
There is nothing like a bundle of legal documents for opening windows on the past. The initial stages can be unpromising. The bundle may perhaps carry on the cover a totally unknown name; you gingerly untie the ribbon, and turn over one or two documents, faded, moldering, partly illegible, for a desultory inspection; but then, something catches your attention—a sworn deposition full of colloquial turns of phrase, a surprisingly intimate personal letter, the notarized evidence of a long-forgotten and dubious-looking transaction—and you begin to read more carefully; and gradually you find yourself irresistibly drawn into a remote and alien world. And then, with the reading, the sense of remoteness begins to disappear. Names recur, and become increasingly familiar; you grow curious about the fate of those who bear them; and slowly, through the stilted legal phrases of those interminable and exasperatingly inconclusive judgments, the outlines of a story begin to emerge.
Review, 2582 words
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