Cleve's biography of Charity and Sylvia takes an approach that both makes the book more readable and requires the audience to read critically. In order to fill in the background and the silences of their lives, we get a lot of general historical details that help make sense of the decisions and actions of their families. But in order to try to contextualize their emotional lives, we also get a lot of interpolation from other lives. "Here is this thing that someone else felt; they could have felt this too." We know that this person was writing poetry about love between women in England at the same era, they might possibly have been familiar with it." Interspersed with quotations from their surviving correspondence, we also get descriptions of things they are asserted to have done, thought, and felt that are not cited to a specific source and that I interpret as being drawn from the author's imagination. I'm of two minds about this approach. One the one hand, it makes for a clearer storyline, in the same way that tv or movie presentations of people's lives fill in or omit details, or rearrange timelines, in order to present a more coherent story. But as someone who is looking for the verifiable facts of history in order to better be able to do similar extrapolations, I'd rather have a clear distinction made in my history books between fact and imagination.
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