Postscript to A Woman of Some Renown.
A dead woman belongs to everyone.
The newspapers take her photograph.
Strangers take her side.
The curious take pieces of her life and arrange them into explanations.
The house where she lived becomes a landmark. The dress she wore becomes evidence. Her letters become literature. Her sadness becomes a theory discussed by people who never heard her laugh.
If she was unknown in life, her death is treated as an introduction.
People begin calling her remarkable.
Misunderstood.
Troubled.
Brilliant.
Beautiful, especially if the photograph permits it.
They say she deserved to be known.
What they mean is that they enjoy knowing her now that she can no longer object.
Death makes a woman wonderfully cooperative.
She cannot correct the story. She cannot refuse the photograph. She cannot say that the dress in the museum was one she hated, or that the letter everyone quotes was written on the worst afternoon of her life.
She cannot tell them they have mistaken the wound for the woman.
In A Woman of Some Renown, I wrote about someone who spent her life as Nobody and became Somebody only after she could no longer decide what that meant.
I thought I was writing about fame.
I may have been writing about ownership.
The living woman belonged to herself.
The dead one became public property.
Everyone wanted a piece of her.
Eventually, that was all that remained.
—Lore
P.S. Renown is only another word for being remembered by people who never knew you.