Tigers make great copy. Gorgeous, ferocious, and prone to be used as metaphors, they’ve starred recently in Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi, and on the billboards of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus along with their glamorous trainer, Sara Houcke. Somewhere in between falls Mabel Stark. Barely five feet of blonde Kentucky pulchritude, Stark was a circus sensation in the 1910s and ’20s, amazing pre-television audiences with both the sheer beauty of her animals (she specialized in highly choreographed " picture " acts) and her bravery (her signature was wrestling with the beasts). As she steps out once again in Robert Hough’s fictional autobiography, she’s also a compelling and ultimately tragic heroine.

Stark’s story could be summed up as that of a woman who loved her tigers too much. More than just her means of attaining fame or the cause of her downfall (through one particular tragedy as well as the expected, but still brutal, maulings), in Hough’s telling, Mabel’s " cat act " provided the emotional core of a troubled life. Despite multiple marriages (he sees her through five, though he acknowledges in his afterward that there was a sixth), her primary connection was to the Bengals, Siberians, and Sumatrans whom she loved and " gentled, " and with whom, at least in one case, she slept and had her longest-lasting mutually enjoyable sexual relationship.

She is, it’s clear, an unconventional heroine. But in Hough’s hands she’s a feisty one, worthy of her fame, who looks back on her life from its twilight in 1968 with a queer mix of circus saltiness and ingrained propriety. It’s a mix that works for a woman of her era and experience, who can refer somewhat coyly to her wifely " duties, " despite her intimacy a few pages later with a tiger’s " manhood, about the size of a whip handle. " Hough’s command of Stark’s voice is wonderful, reminiscent of Glen David Gold’s in Carter Beats the Devil, in part because of the period language but also because of the protagonist’s quite contemporary sense of not quite belonging. Unlike Carter, Stark is not the most articulate or educated speaker. But when she notices something and tries to explain, you get it — and you get her. " See, there’s a lot riding on you having a pure and clear-eyed understanding of the situation, " she says early on, " so I’m going to have to tell it the standard way, the way I would’ve before age settled in and put its feet up and lit itself a slow-burning cigar. "

Drawing from notes written by the real Stark for a memoir that never came together, the Toronto-based author assembles sufficient facts to give his debut novel ballast. He does take some liberties, inventing a stay in a barbaric mental hospital for which there is no documentation. But his logic works, rooted as it is in the society of the early 20th century. Why would a young nurse leave her respectable profession to be a " cooch dancer " if she weren’t fleeing some trauma? Why would her names keep changing, her actual date of birth stay hidden, if she were not constantly afraid of some part of her past?

But though this is historical fiction, depending for much of its color on a world long gone, the truth Hough (and to some extent his heroine) finally uncovers is timeless. Mabel Stark was a strong woman who never cut herself any slack, who worked tirelessly with her tigers and, on at least one occasion, to save her fellow circus troupers. But happiness was beyond her. In a simple, evocative rendering of self-mutilation, Hough describes her placing one of her tiger’s claws on her inner arm: " I pulled, opening up the first layer and leaving three straight, bubbling red shallow furrows. As I did, I sighed. It felt wonderful, all that pressure in my chest releasing. " As her then-husband later asks, in frustration, " Goddammit, Mabel. Can’t you just be happy? " Readers today know that it’s rarely that simple.

To say that Mabel Stark lived with guilt and a lack of self-worth would be to shrink her into a psychobabble victim. In Hough’s eyes — and he’s well supported by the facts — she was something a lot tougher and a lot more fun: a woman of her times who tried her best to rise above the tragedies of her youth and did so with style for much of her glorious, courageous life. After all, as this engaging novel reminds us, we never completely defeat our demons. It’s just that for most of us, our inner devils aren’t brought to life as 500 pounds of beautiful jungle beast.