When we encounter real people from the past, like Dorothy Osborne, and fictional ones, like Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House or Jo March in Little Women, our instinctive responses tell a tale about our values, our commitments, our assumptions, our hopes, our fears—and about theirs. When we perceive some sudden dissonance between ourselves and those people, we should not run from that dissonance but straight toward it. This testing of our responses against those of our ancestors is an exciting endeavor—a potentially endless table conversation, though, again, one we can suspend at any time. (The
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