Skip to main content

Age of Romance



I have to thank you guys for reminding me of The Blithedale Romance as I've been looking through other titles about that era, and came across this biography of the Peabody Sisters.  The book opens with the marriage of Sophia Peabody and Nathaniel Hawthorne, signaling a new age in romance.  Their Diary of a Marriage was on exhibit not so long ago at the Morgan Library and Museum.  The book received great reviews when it came out in 2005.  For some reason I remember it coming up in the old NYTimes forums, but can't sure about that.

Comments

  1. I mentioned that book and an earlier bio of Margaret Fuller on this forum quite a while ago so it's easy to forget. Defo a good book and worth reading but not sure if it's one for a monthly discussion here.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I keep a diary and have done so since 1977 & checked my entries for Nov 2007 and found that this was when I read the Peabody book. A month later I read Blanchard book on Margaret Fuller.

    In thinking about it, I must have read about 30-40 books by or about the Transcendentalists over the years.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The new book on Margaret Fuller is by the same author as the Peabody Sisters.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Good writer - it should be a good book.


      I liked that link to the marriage diary. You know, in all my years of living in NY I never went to the Morgan library. Did spend a lot of time in the main branches of both the Manhattan & Brooklyn libraries, though.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...