There are elements of Margaret Fuller's life that seem to belong to a story, and Madeleine Stern has taken advantage of that fact in her biography. Unlike more formal biographies, this one reads like a work of fiction. Stern used dialogue and description as if this were a novel. Nonetheless, the techniques she used are somewhat controversial, since they represent a recreation of events and thoughts that the author cannot really know. Although Stern indicated that all the details were known from either Fuller's journals or other sources, this is clearly not true when she described what other people were thinking and feeling. In this respect, her work does include invention.
From the very first page of the book, Stern used the technique of recreating the events of Margaret Fuller's life in great detail. She described the thoughts of Fuller's father, a conversation he had with Dr. Holmes, and his state of mind while he was waiting for Margaret to be born. While it is reasonable to suppose that Stern had access to all the available material about Fuller's life and times, it is not reasonable to believe that she could accurately reproduce all these conversations and internal dialogues. In other words, she made them up.
It all sounds plausible, however. Knowing what we know, and Stern knew, about Margaret Fuller and the other characters involved with her life, it is possible to imagine what they must have thought, believed, and said on many occasions. However, this still remains imagination, fiction, made up. It is not strictly historical, even though the reader might approach it as a biography.
In among the historical fiction, there are the historical facts. How can the reader identify what those are, however? Did, for example, Mr. Taylor actually teach Margaret Fuller her music lessons and did Margaret play for the people in Boston? Was that the accurate part of the description of the scene? What of the thoughts at...