Recovering Ruth: A Biographer's Tale (review)

In the beginning, Robert Root planned Recovering Ruth as a book of history and biography. But the book became a story, too, as suggested by the subtitle, "A Biographer's Tale."The story traces Root's multifaceted journey—through books and historical papers, certainly, but also, more compellingly, on foot, by car, by canoe, and in the end, through time, imagination, and spirit—as he pieced together fragments of a nineteenth-century woman's life.

The story began serendipitously. Root happened to pass an exhibit of manuscripts at Central Michigan University, where he teaches. Attracted by the 1848 journal of one Mrs. C. C. Douglass, Root decided to transcribe the work for its historical value. But he fast became "entangled in her life," approaching the material "not as a biographer or historian but as a time traveler, an inhabitant of the past."

Root did complete that original editing project (published as a separate book, Time by Moments Steals Away: The 1848 Journal of Ruth Douglass). But he wasn't finished with Ruth. Still fascinated by the life of his subject, Root set out on the journey traced in Recovering Ruth: to "recover" not just the journal, but also Mrs. C. C. Douglass herself. He quickly realized, however, that "to recover an individual life you must recover the individual's world. They are inseparable; they dwell in one another."

The scholar in Root first turned to books (he calls this being "text-tied"), and then to histories, old maps, and journals written by people in Mrs. C. C. Douglass's circle and by others inhabiting similar realms. But at heart an essayist, Root began to visit, observe, and ultimately connect with some of the places Mrs. Douglass lived, among them Detroit, Chicago, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and most notably, the remote island on Lake Superior where she wrote the journal, Isle Royale.

Early in his project, Root discovers something he calls "urgent," despite a slight hedge in how he reveals it in the prologue: "Perhaps I needed to recover Ruth in order to keep from losing myself."The self-deprecating title of the next chapter, "A Naïve Form of Love and Identification," offers a possible explanation of that "perhaps." Perhaps it captures the initial hesitation when the dutiful objectivity of the scholar disperses, revealing the concealed—and in my view, more vital—personal connection.

In that chapter, Root examines another discovery, one of considerable historical significance: The identity of the journal writer, Mrs. C. C. Douglass, for years assigned to Lydia, the widower C. C. Douglass's second wife, was actually Ruth, his first wife. This news was a shock to historians of the Great Lakes region and to descendents of Lydia Douglass. It also shocked Root. The woman he'd found himself entangled with, however imaginatively, suddenly shifted identity. As Root puts it: "It was as if I had discovered that my wife had used an alias when she married me or that my daughter had been switched at birth with another child."

While an ideal reader for the biographical and historical details might be an inhabitant or historian of the Great Lakes region, Root elicits considerable narrative interest by emphasizing the "fleetness of time," a phrase he quotes from Ruth's journal. Ruth died less than two years after completing the journal, and as Root's painstaking research reveals, there is little left on this earth of Ruth Douglass besides this one rather reticent journal of a single year. There is her grave and the grave of her only child, who died at three months old, shortly after his mother's death from complications of giving birth. There are a few additional textual references to Ruth: an obituary, a wedding announcement, a mention in a will and in someone else's journal. Otherwise, she left barely a trace.

But there is, as Root soon discovered, the...