Skip to main content

Age of Romance

By


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. TripplerAugust 2, 2013 at 5:34 AM

    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. TripplerAugust 2, 2013 at 4:00 PM

    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. James FergusonAugust 2, 2013 at 4:21 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. TripplerAugust 2, 2013 at 8:15 PM

      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

By
  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...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''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
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more