Tag Archives: turn of the century

Historical Diversions: Chevalier and Jewett

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  A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier

Tracy Chevalier has the talent to inform while entertaining, and her latest historical novel – A Single Thread – is a well researched testament to the “surplus women” of the nineteen thirties, caught between two major wars.

With Winchester Cathedral as the backdrop, Chevalier uses the broderers, women who created the embroidered kneeling cushions, and the cathedral bellringers, usually consisting of men only, to tell her story with a little romance, some drama, and a wealth of enlightening information. Based on the work of Louisa Peel and Winchester Cathedral embroidery, Chevalier creates a lovely story full of history few readers will know.

As an ardent embroiderer, I relished some of the intricacies of her descriptions, but I also appreciated the revelations, and will be looking for fylfots among the flowers.

Read the NPR review for more details:  https://www.npr.org/2019/09/21/762825554/a-stitch-in-time-saves-a-life-in-a-single-thread

The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett

I found this old treasure on a list of recommended classics. The only copy in my library system was in large print – all 150 pages – and I was curious about the Thoreau of Maine and the precursor of Elizabeth Strout (“Olive Kitteridge”).

The novella is a series of vignettes describing the narrator’s summer in a fictional coastal town in Maine at the turn of the twentieth century. Each short chapter builds on a sense of peace and quiet, as she describes open fields, dark woods, and rocky shores. She booked rooms in the house of an old herbalist, expecting to shut her self away in solitude but Mrs. Todd and the villagers tempt her out.  She spends most of her time in the village with its elderly citizens, carefully cataloguing their mannerisms and stories. With wit and astute observation, Jewett brings old Maine to life.  She leaves at the end of the summer with a refreshed mind and a sense of nostalgia. 

“…there are paths trodden to the shrines of solitude the world over -the world cannot forget them, try as it may; the feet of the young find them out because of curiosity and dim foreboding; while the old bring hearts full of remembrance…”

Jewett’s writing has been described as realism, but sometimes it seems like poetry. 

 

 

Love, Fiercely – Manhattan Romance in the Gilded Age

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Edith Minturn’s face was immortalized as the “New American Girl” in a portrait by a John Singer Sargent, and she was the model for the famous 65 foot high statue of Daniel Chester French’s Republic displayed at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exhibition. Using the painting as her inspiration, Jean Zimmerman reveals the lives of  Edith Minturn, heir to a shipping magnate, (nicknamed Fiercely by her brother) and her husband, Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, in a story that reads like a fictional romance in Love, Fiercely.

At the turn of century that Mark Twain called “The Gilded Age,” fashion and propriety  ruled wealthy families.

“… Edith Wharton could have quite naturally placed the behaviors of the Minturn girls into one of {her} novels.”

Both Edith and Newton enjoyed the perks of the rich – European travel, posh surroundings, servants, tailor-made clothes.  Newton chose architecture over the family banking business, and  Edith rebelliously fought for women’s rights – she turned down his first proposal of marriage.  The famous portrait came to represent a new freedom for women, with Edith’s pose “with attitude,” the position of the well-placed hat and Newton’s fading into the background.

Using a conversational style, Zimmerman looks back at Manhattan’s history and the famous families who created the foundation for what it is today. Part of the Stokes family mansion still stands as the Morgan Library on 34th street (where I visited the Jane Austen collection not long ago) and their famous portrait hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The couple who look out from the painting changed  Manhattan with a legacy that endures today – through buildings he designed,  reformation of low-income housing, Edith’s introduction of the new concept of kindergarten, and Newton’s Iconography of Manhattan Island – a six-volume visual history of New York that exhausted “its creator’s fortune, health, and grip on sanity.”

Whenever I can wander the halls of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. or the Metropolitan Museum in New York City,  the portraits always tease me with lingering questions – I wonder who were these patricians and did they do anything besides “sit” for the artist. Jean Zimmerman delivers a well-researched answer on one that reveals the personalities behind the paint. Edith Minturn Stokes and Newton Phelps Stokes are worth knowing.