Afua Cooper, a professor of history at the University of Toronto, makes what seems to be an unfounded claim in the subtitle of her new book. The story of Marie-Joseph Angelique, a black slave who set fire to her mistress’s house in Montreal in 1734, is hardly “untold.” A cursory browse on the Internet turned up a short film about the woman, plus a play, a French novel (L’Esclave by Micheline Bail), another non-fiction history, a 2002 art installation and conference in Montreal, as well as references to groundbreaking work on slavery in New France by the maverick Quebec historian Marcel Trudel and entries on Angelique in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography and Wikipedia.

What Cooper really means when she uses the word “untold” is that Angelique’s story has not been told from within a Black-Canadian framework for a primarily English-speaking readership before. And that is a valuable thing to do. Most Anglo-Canadians, if asked to compute the words “slavery” and “Canada” in the same thought, would respond with the phrase “Underground Railroad.”

It is our comfortable prevailing myth that we were the good guys during that terrible phase of North American history, providing a safe haven for thousands of escaped slaves from the United States from about 1830 to 1860. This is not the whole truth. Although the numbers were never large, wealthy early Canadians did have slaves: it’s not a surprise to hear that the Jarvises of the infamous Family Compact did, but to see names like Joseph Papineau and Joseph Brant in the ranks of slave-owners is an eye-opener.

Almost everything that is known about Angelique comes from a single document: her trial transcript, which relates that she was born in Portugal, moved to the Low Countries, then to New England, and finally to New France, being sold at least twice along the way. She bore three children during her bondage to a wealthy fur merchant in Montreal, but they all died in infancy. When she met a Frenchman, she began plotting her escape. They ran away together, were caught and returned, and shortly thereafter the home Angelique worked in caught fire, a fire that spread rapidly to destroy 45 other buildings in old Montreal. Angelique was tried for arson, found guilty, and originally sentenced to have her hand amputated before being burned alive. On appeal the sentence was “softened” to hanging, but Angelique was first tortured in order to reveal the name of her accomplice, which she did not do.

Cooper has taken the tantalizingly slim story of Angelique and used it as a skeleton on which to hang a wide-ranging social history of Atlantic slavery on both sides of the ocean. The romantic Portuguese explorers we all studied in Grade 5 – Bartholomew Diaz and Vasco da Gama – were buried up to their fat pocketbooks in the slave trade. Converted Jews, or “new Christians” as they were known, provided many of the vital links between Portugal and the Low Countries, while Dutch, English, and French traders transported human cargo to the Caribbean and thence to North America. Once she moves Angelique speculatively to Montreal, Cooper then moves into a social history of the fur trade and its intersection with slavery.

None of this quite gels. The book has the twin disadvantages of being over-researched and under-imagined. Under a mountainous eiderdown of historical fact, Angelique herself remains frustratingly muffled, with Cooper constantly having to resort to contingent phrases like “We may wonder” and “In all likelihood.” In fact, this book makes the most eloquent case possible for the role of fiction in helping to unearth a nation’s history. A novelist, perhaps inspired by Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, could tell us how it must have felt to be Angelique and why she would have been compelled to destroy the world around her.

As it is, Cooper steps startlingly out of her historian’s role at the end of her narrative to display the motive she is sure directed Angelique’s hand: revenge. “She would roast, burn and grill them, and so do to them what they had been doing to her all her days.” Cooper is here repudiating the thesis of earlier Quebec historians who argue that it was Angelique’s attachment to her white lover, Claude Thibault, that caused her to set the fire. In this judgment call, Cooper is probably right. And yet Cooper never manages to bring Angelique to life enough for us to sense her making her deadly choice.

In her final chapter, Cooper makes the “bold claim” that Angelique’s trial transcript is the first slave narrative in North America, predating previous claims by 26 years. Although the transcript is not in Angelique’s voice, having been penned by a court reporter, it is certainly a riveting piece of early Canadian history. But I’m still waiting for the novel … and the movie.