It was a story he had
heard while vacationing on Nantucket. There was a woman, he was told, who had
married a sailor only to be deserted by him. It was perhaps the perfect tale of
romance and desperation for the writer to tackle at that time. “As a man
abandoned by his public, Melville may have been disposed to be sympathetic
toward another loving, responsive young person wrongly abandoned,” scholar
Hershel Park[er] wrote in the second
volume of his biography of the writer. . . . It was Melville scholar Hershel Parker who
unearthed the true nature—and the chosen title—of this lost work by putting together
the clues dropped throughout letters and references.
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