I'm going to look up the story behind the story later, but here's what I thought. She took the facts, probably did a good bit of research, then set out to write the story as fiction. My guess is that the facts didn't include the name of the girl who bore Franklin's illegitimate child; her lifestyle and habits and thoughts; the many people who befriended or took advantage of her; her family; even her medical issues. The mental instability of Franklin's wife may have been fact or deduction, but her private behavior at home would not be on record. The facts may have included the name and occupation of Franklin's son's mistress and something about the birth of his son's son; they would certainly include his posting as Royal Governor of New Jersey, but probably not the jeers and taunts from the citizens of the revolution. Those details had to be made up.
The people she invented were all interesting, well detailed, imminently believable. They could very much be real. It makes me a little uneasy to think that such well-crafted fiction might be confused for fact someday. I mean, think about it--how many teenagers of today think that Abraham Lincoln's mother was killed by a vampire bite?
But what bugs me is that the author stuck to the plot defined in history, so she couldn't write a real novel. Real novels have a punch line. They have some mystery in them, some puzzle to keep them alive. The closest thing to mystery this novel had was the constantly recurring question of whether Anna would tell her son that she was his mother, and if so, how would he react to her.
I would have liked this a thousand times better if it had been 100% fiction. There's plenty of really exciting works of history out there--I don't see the need to make stuff up if you can't make up a new plot, too. Or unless it's vampires.
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