Pretty Letters 
Megan Marshall
Where to begin? It’s the biographer’s fundamental dilemma. These days it’s a rare biography that opens with a recital of its subject’s pedigree, then works its way methodically from cradle to grave. Chronology is both a gift and a curse, offering an attractively simple narrative structure but risking the tedium of ever-forward motion. Why not borrow the sure-fire novelistic tricks of flashback and flash-forward to elude that soporific ‘and then’?
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Megan Marshall, who teaches at Emerson College, Boston, is the author of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism.
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