But there is also some suggestion that not long after Scaleby was finished, the Gilpin family entered a period of financial stasis, if not erosion. When Faust’s grandfather, Kenneth N. Gilpin, inherited the property in 1924, its value was esti­mated at $105,000—about 1.2 million in today’s dollars. According to the National Register application, however, “in that year, the value of buildings on the property began a precipitous decline from their value of $105,165 to $40,000 in 1928. The only explanation for the pre-Dep­ression drop seems to be neglect. Kenneth N. Gilpin, Jr., voiced the opinion [to the writer] that his father moved to the estate in the 1920s to go broke in style, which could also be a contributing reason for the estate’s decline in value.”

Kenneth Gilpin Sr. died in 1947, leaving a $2 million trust whose returns would go to his wife and three children, including Drew Faust’s father. Those returns do not appear to have been sufficient to maintain the family’s to-the-manor-born lifestyle. In 1986, Scaleby was sold to a buyer who restored the estate to its erstwhile grandeur.

Still, it was a lofty childhood. Newspaper accounts of Faust’s parents chronicle their social goings-on in a Gatsby-like world, a whirlwind of horse races, society weddings, and formal balls, with all the attendant, bittersweet elements of imm­inently fading glamour. Much like the Civil War-era southern women Faust wrote about in her book Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, Faust was born into the upper crust of Virginia society just as that society was on the verge of profound change.

Even as a girl, Faust seems to have been well aware of the changes swirling around her elite world. In a now much-cited 2003 Harvard Magazine essay, “Living History,” Faust describes how in 1957 she wrote a letter to Dwight Eisenhower protesting segregation. “So what if [African-Americans’] skin is black?” the nine-year-old implored the president. “They still have feelings but most of all are God’s people!  …  Please Mr. Eisenhower please try and have schools and other things accept colored people.”

Faust’s mini-biography was an effective narrative; the letter-to-Eisenhower story permeated subsequent media portrayals of the president-elect. But while that essay has shaped the perception of Faust as a “rebel,” it also contains clues to a more nuanced identity and hints that Faust knows the selectivity of the self-portrait she is painting. “We create ourselves out of the stories we tell about our lives,” she admits. “Fashioned out of memories, our stories become our identities.” What then does the essay tell us about Faust—or at least, about the identity that she fashioned for herself?

Faust projected an image with which she was comfortable: the young, precocious girl, protesting injustice from an early age, a sort of proactive Scout Finch, transcending the limitations of her fortunate upbringing. “The fact that Drew the mature historian gives voice to the letter of the young girl shows that she believes that truth can come from many different places, from the sophisticated to the educated to the child,” says Homi Bhabha, a Harvard professor of literature. “The desire to listen to the child is the desire, in my view, to have very few preconceptions as to where the truth might come from.”

“I grew up in a man’s world and a white world,” Faust writes. She also grew up in a moneyed world. Her childhood more closely resembles that of Derek Bok, who comes from an enormously wealthy publishing family, than that of Neil Rudenstine, whose father was a prison guard and mother a waitress. Faust may be a woman, with the social and professional challenges that can follow from her gender, but she possesses the social ease and confidence of a woman who came of age amidst wealth and high society.

To understand Drew Faust, you must consider these aspects of her composition, understand that the only details of her inner life that are widely known are those she herself has chosen to disseminate. As a girl, Faust wanted to improve the system, but she always worked within it—she wrote letters. If, as a woman, she challenged the status quo in any way that might jeopardize her professional advancement, there is no record of it. Whatever rebellions she might once have contained seemed to diminish as she grew older and more professionally successful.

Leaving Virginia, Faust prepped at Concord Academy, then an all-girls’ school in Massachusetts, and continued her education at Bryn Mawr. After graduating in 1968, she earned her doctorate in American civilization at the University of Pennsylvania, where she eventually became a tenured professor specializing in women’s and Civil War history.

Faust was a popular teacher. “There wasn’t a dull moment in her lectures, and you’d marvel at her ability to hold her class’s attention,” says Mark Drozdowski, a former student who is now the director of a college foundation. But for all her expertise, Drozdowski says, Faust was still approachable. “She didn’t seem to have a big ego,” he recalls. “She didn’t have the descending-from-Mount-Olympus kind of attitude.”

In 1989, Harvard tried to hire Faust away from Penn; the university’s history department was in dire need of rebuilding and Faust was a two-fer, a gifted historian and a woman. (The department needed both.) Faust said no: Harvard would not offer her second husband, Charles Rosenberg, a suitable position. Moreover, according to one professor who knows Faust, “she wasn’t particularly fond of Harvard” at the time, preferring the more collegial atmosphere at Penn. In 1994, Yale too tried to woo Faust and her husband, acc­ording to Nancy Cott, then a professor in the Yale history department. “They didn’t accept that position like they didn’t accept a lot of offers,” Cott says. “I think they were just happy where they were.”

But another colleague of Faust’s has a different interpretation of her thinking at the time. After a number of years teaching at Penn, says this professor, Faust came to the realization that “she wanted to do more than just be a historian, that she really  wanted to be a college president.” Those ambitions were still relatively modest. “I don’t know if she was aiming for Harvard’s presidency—probably more along the lines of Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, something like that.” Moving to another history department was, perhaps, less interesting to Faust than a move upward into academic administration.

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