The Thirteenth Husband, Greer Macallister, 2024 Sourcebooks, ISBN-13: 978-1-7282-9407-0, $16.99, Paperback
As with her previous historical fiction novels Girl in Disguise and Arctic Fury, Greer Macallister chose a trail-blazing woman as the subject of The Thirteenth Husband. Aimée Crocker, who inherited untold wealth as a child in the late 1800’s, recognized the power that money afforded women and used it to embrace her independence. She broke societal rules to travel the world, seek out adventure and create the life she wanted rather than the one she was prescribed. Macallister portrays her protagonist as a woman who loved to flirt, who made her own decisions to marry or divorce, and unashamedly took lovers as it suited her. In the face of external judgment of her personal losses and ‘unladylike’ disposition, she projected a delightfully contrarian voice:
The tabloids found a hundred different ways to trumpet it on their pages, sneak it into other stories, point it up again and again. I finally stopped reading the papers.
The title The Thirteenth Husband may imply a singular focus on Aimée’s romantic life, but Macallister pulls back the lens to consider the era’s gender disparities, and the greater latitude in personal choices granted to Crocker’s male contemporaries. Despite the material luxuries she indulged in, and a staff that kept the lights burning when she retreated to her bedroom, Aimée struggled against the oppression of women and the rigidity of her social class.
Macallister channels Aimée’s voice through a first-person point-of-view; frequent doses of interiority give insights to conflicts which isolated Aimée from her mother and sister, both ‘proper’ ladies:
…the two were cut from the same cloth, believing that women should only exercise the power given to them by society…and stepping aside for men in all things. I stepped aside for no man, except to flutter my eyelashes at him if the spirit moved.
The Thirteenth Husband employs an epistolary style that ties together its multiple narrative threads. Beginning in the first line, Aimée, the narrator, addresses an unnamed ‘you’:
You know, don’t you, that I’ve been fighting this nearly my entire life?
The technique effectively serves as a through-line and adds a sense of suspense and expectation, leading the reader to consider the intended recipient of the story. Another connecting element is a recurring mystery in the form of a ghost-like figure who appears throughout Aimée’s life. The pursuit of the unknown figure intertwines Aimée’s desire to foresee her future and propels her towards spiritual quests across the globe.
Aimée was legendary for her travels, and Macallister spans multiple settings, from elite sitting rooms in California to the beaches of Hawaii, the canals of Venice and bullfights of Spain, before veering away from tourist stops in Japan and India. Each setting is explored long enough to offer a sense of place, and to sample the extravagance and excitement of Aimée’s life. As part of her research process, Macallister accessed Aimée’s memoir And I’d Do It Again, noting in the acknowledgments the challenge of condensing such an experience-rich life. Crocker’s memoir reads as a series of ‘exotic’ exploits, perilous life and death adventures in Europe and Asia, each tale more outlandish than the last. Macallister, who perceived the memoir’s narrator as a somewhat unreliable witness, used news sources to excise truth from exaggeration, and her own imagination to interpret Aimée’s inner life, which is often brushed aside in the memoir.
Aimée was a woman of contradictions, and The Thirteenth Husband effectively captures her love of other cultures while filtering out the outdated, colonial viewpoints present in And I’d Do It Again. Macallister had the benefit of viewing her life from a modern sensibility; the novel gives voice to Aimée’s search for personal and spiritual connections, using quotes from the memoir at each chapter’s opening:
Oh, …the human beings of the world! What a kaleidoscope they make…with their constantly transmuting characters and variegated souls!
Aimée openly rejected the closed, classist society she was born into and expressed a feeling of kinship with countries maintaining their culture in the face of imperialism:
India’s soul will never concede anything to the Saxon system… or philosophy. You can send your missionaries, your lawgivers, your officers…but you can never dominate a country whose composite mind thinks in millennia, whose ideals have nothing in common with yours…
Reading historical fiction, beyond the pleasure of witnessing an earlier time, is a reminder of the past’s relevance to current circumstances. Infamous due to her wealth and lifestyle, Aimée was an early victim of tabloid-style media. Before ‘paparazzi’ was a common term, and before Prince Harry described the disastrous effects of media scrutiny on his family in his memoir Spare, the newspapers hounded and shamed Aimée. The press profited from her losses, acting as a lifelong thorn in her side:
The press called me wild, among other things. They were outraged by the notion of a woman determined to make her own choices.
Macallister skillfully shows Aimée, with her triumphs and her foibles, as human, as a person who was capable of feeling the words’ sting:
And what had I ever done wrong, really? Had a bit too much fun here and there? I’d been given money I hadn’t earned, but heaven knew that was true of most rich people.
Beneath the surface, the novel explores issues facing women at the turn of the century, and the responsibility of prior generations to fight for personal freedoms—if not for themselves, then for their daughters. Aimée clashes with her family, frustrated by her inability to vote or pursue a chosen career. When she calls out her mother for accepting the status quo, she’s scolded for being unappreciative of her privilege:
“Your generation,” she [her mother] said dismissively. “You think everything’s so hard for women. You complain about it nonstop…All that was true of my generation too. And you didn’t hear us whine.”
The Thirteenth Husband is a story of personal survival; while Aimée had almost unlimited wealth, her diminished status as a woman impacted her ability to create her own course. Macallister’s novel touches on themes of autonomy, of fighting against society’s expectations, and accepting personal sorrows as an intrinsic part of a life lived honestly. “Even the mistakes I made were worth making,” Aimée says. “I would make them again too.” As was true in the past, wealth has the capability of opening up some, not all, doors.
With heartbreaking clarity, The Thirteenth Husband highlights how closely Aimée’s struggles mimic those of modern women, who hear messages to sit back and enjoy the traditional role as wife and mother. Macallister draws parallels between Aimée’s rejection by her family and the greater society to the current backlash against the search for equality. Modern readers may lack Aimée’s advantages, yet her example provides a reminder of what is gained and lost in an effort to fight the status quo, to subvert norms, to make choices with one’s own body, and to hope for a future that will expand rather than contract women’s personal freedoms.
© Greer Macallister and Mary Sophie Filicetti
Greer Macallister is the USA Today bestselling author of four historical fiction novels prior to The Thirteenth Husband, as well as the fantasy trilogy The Five Queendoms. She holds an MFA from American University and is a regular contributor to Writer Unboxed. Raised in the Midwest, Greer currently lives in Boston with her family; her social media handle is @theladygreer.
Mary Sophie Filicetti is a teacher whose fiction has appeared in The MacGuffin, The Saturday Evening Post, Every Day Fiction, Nightingale and Sparrow, The Magnolia Review, 365 Tomorrows, and The Phoenix, among others. She holds an MFA from Spalding University and is a first fiction reader at Little Patuxent Review.
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