MRS. BALLOU

A historical novel based on the real life of a 19th-century spiritualist feminist.

Allan (Addie, 2011) has spent the last few years researching and writing about the life of Addie Ballou, a poet in the late 1800s. More than anything, she says, her scholarship has led her to conclude that “the personal stories of women [have] been left untold and at a minimum misunderstood....[U]nspeakable secrets went with them to their graves.” Readers first meet Addie as she returns home from supporting the Union during the Civil War as a battlefield nurse while her husband was off fighting as a soldier. When she arrives, she finds that he disrespects her and is cruel to their children and that his family despises her. She becomes determined to live as independently as possible within the confines of her situation. Fully entrenched in the spiritualist movement, she gains some agency by lecturing across the Midwest and writing poetry for spiritualist publications, but it’s not enough: She’s not allowed any claim to her earnings, and her husband still rules the roost at home. Eventually, she takes her infant daughter and leaves her husband and her young sons, setting out on a path of spiritualism, suffrage and sovereignty. The path isn’t easy, though, as there are some marital reconciliations and legal obstacles Addie must navigate in order to finally get a divorce. Allan’s dedication to highlighting the life of an early proponent of women’s rights is admirable. Spiritualist researchers will be grateful for Allan’s thoroughly researched work (inspired, she says, by Addie’s original diaries). Newcomers to the subject matter may also find Addie’s journey interesting, if not inspirational. Overall, it’s not an especially exciting story: A pattern develops of Addie traveling somewhere to lecture, staying at someone’s house, getting advice from them and then traveling again. As a result, the scenes end up blurring together. The prose is a bit inconsistent; it’s either overwritten (“Addie suddenly saw clarity in the woman’s heretofore rambling collection of data expressed in her dialogue”) or too sparse (“There. It was said. The accusation made”). The terms of spiritualism also aren’t clearly defined, despite a brief introduction before the novel begins.

Although Ballou’s odds don’t feel insurmountable in this uneven tale, readers will likely applaud her determination as she undertakes her journey to freedom.