The story in Frances Timbers's The Magical Adventures of Mary Parish goes something like this. Goodwin Wharton, the youngest son of the fourth Baron Wharton, was a penurious Whig politician and mystic. In 1683 he met a thrice-married widow named Mary Parish, a lowborn, ambitious, “cunning woman,” or what today we might call a medium. She supplied him with a charm to improve his luck at gambling, but once they had gotten to know each other better, she introduced him to the world of the fairies, who offered guidance for finding hidden treasure and offered to make Wharton their king. Other messages came directly from God or from angels, some concerning women (including his own relatives) whom he should seduce. Wharton and Parish, who was also broke, needed each other, and so formed an unusual emotional and sexual relationship. Wharton recorded their lives, and their bizarre exploits, in an autobiography.

It is an extraordinary tale, engagingly told. Vivid descriptions of life in early modern London, as well as some imaginative recreations—“the sweet cinnamon scent of juniper hung in the air” (3)—are overlaid with a sensitive portrayal of a lost outlook on the role of magic in daily life, a way of seeing things and of getting by, not clearly distinct either from dreams and imagination or from medicine and chemistry. Wharton's spiritual excursions mattered to him, not because they made him rich or wise, but because they helped him discover himself and offered “many opportunities to confront his fears and prove his manhood” (132). She describes the sorts of covert ritual practices—conjuration, veneration, divination—that it was possible for even ordinary people to engage in. Such covert practices are something for historians to keep in mind even when direct evidence is lacking. Moreover, it may seem ridiculous that Wharton (or anyone else) should try to soften glass with goat's blood, but at that time the essential properties of matter, and relationships between different forms of matter, were both incompletely understood and likely to arouse curiosity. Ignore the errors for a moment: this yearning to know lay behind the Scientific Revolution.

Timbers sympathetically lays out a detailed yet broad picture of seventeenth-century life, with all the ups and downs of political turbulence (there was tension between the Catholic Parish and Protestant Wharton, sensibly dissipated through their visits to the fairy kingdom); financial insecurity; brushes with the law; alcoholism and despair; poor diet; epidemic disease; premature deaths; and, for women serial pregnancies—twenty-two of them in Parish's case, or so she claimed (Wharton wrote that she was carrying one of his many illegitimate children as she lay on her deathbed in 1703: she was seventy-two).

There is a historical problem at the heart of this book, one that students of history and literature may enjoy debating, but is not easily resolved. From the start, Timbers is eager to calm any unease we may feel, inviting us to suspend disbelief and “pass through the looking glass and enter a liminal world between fantasy and reality” (1). As one reads on, however, this invitation starts to feel more like a disclaimer. Many crucial facts of the story are hard to verify, leaving us with fundamental questions of method and interpretation.

In The Magical Adventures of Mary Parish we have a single narrative—Wharton's autobiography, an unpublished 500-page manuscript in the British Library—surrounded and supported by contexts assembled from other documents. Timbers has followed good historical practice, but so much of the story still depends on a single source. And the beguiling effect of this methodology is to dissolve some very unreliable information—at best tendentious, at worst false—into a unified, seamless, apparently objective version of the truth. In an appendix, Timbers admits that “the nature of Mary's narrative makes it difficult to accurately pinpoint the events that she mentions in her life” (187). But things are even murkier than that statement suggests, for the narrative is actually Wharton's. As Timbers acknowledges, everything we see has been filtered through him.

Readers may feel that Timbers wants us to side with Parish. Male, usually elite male, voices are loud in the historical record, whereas women from the lower orders are mostly silent, often passive, or even invisible. But it would not be right to make Parish into something she may not have been. Moreover, not all historians think she deserves our respect. Some historians have supposed her to be a fraud, duping the vulnerable Wharton. Wharton may even have been mentally ill: Roy Porter, writing in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ranked his autobiography “high in the annals of psychopathology.” The fact is we do not know what is real here, and without more sources we cannot know.

Timbers deals with these problems by dismissing them briskly in her introduction so that, with the reader's tacit assent, she can get on with the story. But the reader may feel that she has chosen to see the story the way she does not because the evidence strongly suggests that interpretation. The less troubling aspects of this book, indeed its real strengths, are the many encouragements to understand the psychic bridges connecting seventeenth-century public lives and inner lives with a mysterious cosmos full of divine and magical forces.

It is important to treat past beliefs as past reality, and this Timbers does in a bold and accomplished way. By the end of this book, however, the “liminal world between fantasy and reality” (1) starts to feel more like the blurred line between history and fiction. Timbers has written a very interesting book that tests the limits of history, which is to be applauded, but her effort may exceed those limits. On the other hand, doing so may well be her greatest contribution: to make us think harder about the fictive qualities of history and the historicization of literature, and how best scholars and students should position themselves between the two.