Marblehead’s Pygmalion: Finding the Real Agnes Surriage

Agnes Surriage, it turns out, was more Pygmalion than Cinderella. Her role models were the fiercely independent codfish widows, ? wives of the early Marblehead fishermen who managed home and family seven months a year without their husbands. In Agnes’s version of My Fair Lady, she had to act as her own Henry Higgins while making the often painful transformation from girl of all works ? at the Fountain Inn to the charming and dignified Lady Agnes, wife of Sir Charles Henry Frankland. After deconstructing the legend for twenty-five years, author F. Marshall Bauer has unearthed a story of money, lust and vindication.