Fiction with famous dead people in it

"Not long ago, in a frenzy of cultural homesteading, literary fiction began appropriating the personae of real individuals, mostly dead, mostly famous. While this wasn't a brand-new tactic, and its appeal had long been recognized—when Virginia Woolf chose to narrate Flush from the vantage point of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel, she meant the novel to be a bestseller—the sheer number of writers relying on this approach was new, and suggested that the relation between narration and "reality" was being reimagined, not writer by writer, but communally, in a far-flung literary project with a terrific appetite for figures who had in common two things: first, they were in some way compelling; second, they'd once lived and breathed. The spectrum of appropriated personae ranges from Lee Harvey Oswald's to Vermeer's, Virginia Woolf's to Frida Kahlo's, but its finitude was suggested by the recurrence of certain figures, with Kahlo, for instance, turning up in three different novels." Read on.