SOURCE: Toth, Emily. “Questioning the Quest.” Women's Review of Books 6, no. 1 (February 1989): 11.

In the following excerpt, Toth discusses the plot of The Truth about Lorin Jones, noting the struggles of protagonist Polly Alter to write a biography of Lorin Jones—struggles similar to Toth's own in writing her biography of Kate Chopin.

No feminist biographer ever starts out from disinterested, “scholarly” motives (if such motives even exist—which I doubt). Usually, we start out wanting to reclaim a sister. We want our subject to be our foremother and our friend, and occasionally even our reader-adviser. Certainly we want a mentor, or at least a cautionary tale.

But sometimes we find out that our subject did dumb things, or mean things. She may simply refuse to fit our definition of what a feminist ought to have done (my current subject, Kate Chopin, for instance, hankered after other women's husbands...