I think this would make an awesome story for someone...
Thinking further about people faking it and telling stories that diverge from the strict truth, and family myths as embodied in a conversation I had yesterday about doing genealogy and hearing the family story that one forebear was descended from a long line of army officers, but whose father, on investigation, turned out to be a sergeant (who had, eventually, true, been commissioned).
And a novel (No Son of Mine) by my darling GB Stern about a man who lets it be supposed to his advantage that he is a byblow of Robert Louis Stevenson (whom he much resembles).
And the mention in this article by Kathryn Hughes about George Eliot and The Mill on the Floss:
Inveterate gossips such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Harriet Martineau made things even murkier by adding embellishments, including a fictitious illegitimate baby, to this already most juicy of literary scandals.
Which at first made me go 'Cool! why has no-one written the story in which she actually did have a baby?'
And then:
Made me think of a story in which Marion Evans is responsible for the care and upbringing (probably not by herself but by carefully-chosen foster-parents, whom she visits regularly) of a girl who is the illegitimate offspring of a dearly loved female friend (?e.g. suppose Barbara Leigh Smith had succumbed to John Chapman, instead of resisting him?).
Who maybe grows up with the inchoate belief that she is, in fact, Ms Evans' own daughter...
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