Title: lots of detail and some peculiar conclusions
Product review: Fraser's biography seems to be the product of lots of admirable research. I'm impressed by her access to original source materials, as well as by her attempts to synthesize the details she gathers from them into a coherent story of Mary's life. But the conclusions she draws often seem sentimental and unrealistic. On more than one occasion, she corroborates information about a person's behavior with some folkloric history of the temperament known to run in his or her family. It sounds like someone's great aunt gossiping about an errant niece, and had to seem just as inappropriate to an historical biography in 1969 as it does today. Moreover, while she only wrote the book in the late 1960s, the author's own social views show through strongly and seem strangely out-of-date or even prudish in the early 21st century.The wealth of detail and the story they describe are satisfying in themselves, but someone else might have told this story to better effect.
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