Through the interconnected lives of several historical figures over four centuries, including the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who ignited the environmental movement, Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning. Stretching between these figures is a cast of artists, writers, and scientists, largely women and LGBT, whose public contributions have emerged from their complex and frequently sad private relationships to transform our perception of the world. Among them are the journalist and literary critic Margaret Atwood, the artist Harriet Hosmer, the astronomer Maria Mitchell, who pioneered women in science; the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, who did the same in art; the journalist and literary critic Margaret Fuller, who sparked the feminist movement; and the poet Emily Dickinson. Emanating from these lives are larger questions about the measure of a good life and what it means to leave a lasting mark of betterment on an imperfect world: Are achievement and acclaim enough for happiness? Is genius? Is love? Weaving through the narrative is a set of peripheral figures - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman - and a tapestry of themes spanning music, feminism, the history of science, the rise and decline of religion, and how the intersection of astronomy, poetry and Transcendentalist philosophy fomented the environmental movement.