I don’t
recall the issue we were debating. It was too long ago, and now it hardly
matters. But an idea had been raised in my college sociology class that
provoked some heated discussion. At one point a student read a passage from our
textbook to support his opinion. The instructor listened and then asked us all,
“Do you think the book is right?”
I sat up a
little straighter. What was that? Was she suggesting the book might be wrong?
The book, that esteemed authority—words printed in black ink and bound in a
hard cover—wrong? While the rest of the class argued on, I pondered this
startling notion.
As you may
have guessed, the most important lesson I learned in Sociology 101 was to be a
critical reader. It is one that has served me well as a writer of nonfiction,
because again and again in my research I have encountered books that were
wrong. I have learned to question, to track down original sources, and to weigh
the printed evidence.
I could
show how this healthy skepticism has paid off by citing examples from the
research that went into nearly every one of my books, including The Brontë Sisters. More than one writer
has adopted an authoritative tone, for instance, to write that in 1855 Charlotte Brontë died of
tuberculosis, the disease that took the lives of at least four of her five
siblings. But how did these authors know this? The answer is that they didn’t;
not really. They saw it in another secondary source or jumped to a conclusion
after glancing at the facts. The reader or researcher who bothers to
investigate Charlotte’s
case finds that the cause of her death is uncertain. Her death certificate
states that she died of phthisis, a wasting away, but was it due to
consumption, as these writers assume, or to the severe intestinal illness that
had been plaguing her for weeks? Some authors declare that Charlotte, who was
recently married at the time of her death, was pregnant. Charlotte Brontë
herself believed this was true, if only because of the severe nausea she was
experiencing. Did she actually die of morning sickness, though? It must be
noted that the foul water in the Brontës’ village of Haworth was known to
carry disease, and a longtime family servant had sickened and died in a similar
way only a short time before. So did Charlotte
succumb to waterborne contamination? These are all questions I cannot answer.
As her biographer, I saw only one way to be honest with my readers and fair to
my subject: I described how Charlotte
died, but I offered no diagnosis.
So, yes,
books can contain factual errors; they can also be wrong, or at least
untrustworthy, when it comes to words placed inside quotation marks. Here’s
what happens: one writer paraphrases something a subject wrote or said. A
second writer repeats the statement word for word and attributes it not to the
writer who did the paraphrasing, but to the well-known man or woman whose words
were paraphrased in the first place. At some point, as more writers repeat them,
the words become enshrined in quotation marks. Content to cite in their
endnotes some other secondary source, these writers never check whether the
words were ever uttered.
I
encountered one of these suspicious quotations when the time came to write
about Anne Brontë’s novel The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall. Published in 1848, this book was ahead of its time in its
frank depiction of alcohol abuse and marital discord. At one point in the
narrative, the distraught wife, Helen Huntingdon, bolts her bedroom door against
her husband and refuses to let him enter. Now, I am sure such things happened
in England
in the 1840s, but no one spoke of them above a whisper, and certainly no one
wrote of them in a novel. A wife denying her husband access to her bed?
Shocking!
“The
slamming of Helen Huntingdon’s bedroom door against her husband reverberated
through Victorian England,” proclaimed a writer of a later generation, May
Sinclair. Or did she? This great quotation appears in a number of critical
works, but not one lists a source. Literary detective that I am, I tracked down
Sinclair’s actual words in her 1913 book The
Three Brontës. And what Sinclair wrote is this: “The slamming of that
bedroom door fairly resounds through the emptiness of Anne’s novel.” The second
quote is less dramatic than the first, but it is accurate, and it is the one I
included in my book, properly sourced. Thus I made a small correction to
literary history, but a satisfying one.
Fortunately
for us all, authors get their facts right more often than not. Nevertheless,
students can be better writers of nonfiction—which is what they are when
writing reports or essays—if they read critically. Where did the author get her
facts? Check the notes and bibliography. Does he cite primary sources, and is
it possible to track them down? Students may not have access to a research
library, but many older texts are available online. Do the words “perhaps,”
“might have,” and “must have” crop up too often? These are signals that the
author is speculating. Students need not be in college to learn to question
what they read and to cite printed sources with care.
Because once doubt has been cast on part of a nonfiction
work, the rest becomes suspect. We want our readers to trust what we write.
BIO: Catherine Reef has written more than
forty nonfiction books for young people and adults, among them The Bronte Sisters: The Brief Lives of Charlotte, Emily, and
Anne and Leonard Bernstein and
American Music. Her work has earned her the Sydney Taylor Award and the
Joan G. Sugarman Children's Book Award as well as Golden Kite and Jefferson Cup
Honors. A graduate of Washington State University,
she lives in College Park, Maryland. Visit her online at http://catherinereef.com/index.html
