Fictional lives

A question:  is it just me, or is there a sudden trend toward fiction based on real lives?  I'm only asking because I've suddenly found myself reading a lot of new books that fall into this category. This isn't entirely surprising, given my love of nonfictional lives, but it seems to be a little more than a coincidence.  But I like it, even if it is. :)  Would it be your cup of tea?

I've liked three of the four very much.  I wrote about The Arrangement, and though I never got around to telling you about Sophie and the Sibyl, more a mixture of fact and fiction, it was just a lot of fun to read.  I'll probably finish Margaret the First tomorrow.  I was drawn to it because of its cover, to be honest, but the writing is very rich and lyrical and the Duchess — an unconventional, prolific, compulsive writer, married to a caring and supportive nobleman who flees to Paris, then Belgium, during Cromwell's reign — is a wonderful character. {The one  that didn't work as well for me, The Madwoman Upstairs, isn't really the same kind of fictional life, because the real people in it are in the background; it focuses on a modern-day descendant of the Bronte family, an alleged treasure trove of Bronte artifacts, and (I thought) a relatively uninteresting plot interspersed with a lot of (more interesting, but convoluted) back-and-forth about the relationships among the Bronte sisters and the meaning and relative literary importance of their novels.}

So, in the end, two were about people I knew a little bit about (M.F.K. Fisher and George Eliot), and the second two weren't (the Brontes and Margaret Cavendish, the 17th-century Duchess of Newcastle).  I don't think this especially matters to me, because hopefully I'm either spending time with someone I already know and like, or sparking an interest in someone new and unfamiliar.  And all of them sent me scurrying off to note down biographies or diaries or letters that I could read someday, or soon.  I've already had Claire Harman's new biography of Charlotte Bronte on deck to read this month {it being her bicentennial}, and though I'm not planning to read the whole thing right now, I also borrowed a biography of George Eliot from the library just to see if one of Patricia Duncker's characters, the stalking Miss Simcox, was a real person.  I hope so!