The Lioness of Boston

March 13, 2023
Franklin (Liner Notes) offers a vivid narrative of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s evolution into a pioneering art collector and museum founder. New Yorker Isabella marries wealthy Boston Brahmin Jack Gardner in 1860 at age 19. The straitlaced Jack appreciates his unpredictable wife’s intellect and creativity, though she gets a cold reception from Boston’s well-heeled matrons. A year later, Isabella considers the “sad magic to being female, a disappearing of the self,” and hopes that motherhood will win her social acceptance and help provide the sense of purpose she craves. Instead, her only child dies of pneumonia before he turns two, and a subsequent miscarriage leaves her unable to conceive again. During a lengthy stay in Europe, Jack hopes to ease her paralyzing grief. There, she meets Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and other luminaries who encourage her love of learning and passion for the arts. Isabella’s confidence deepens—and her reputation for eccentricity grows—as she begins to acquire artworks for the museum she opens in 1903. The novel brims with pitch-perfect period details, such as Isabella’s ability to shock New England society merely by wearing blue shoes, and Franklin cannily captures Gardner’s ambition, independence, and quirks. Fans of strong female protagonists and Gilded Age historicals will enjoy this. Agent: Esmond Harmsworth, Aevitas Creative Management.

April 15, 2023
Famous for her idiosyncratic, frozen-intime Boston museum, smart, inquisitive, independent, and scandalous Isabella Stewart Gardner is as enticing a subject for a historical novelist as she was for John Singer Sargent, whose portrait of her so shocked the blue bloods. Franklin avails herself of many intriguing facts, but gives her imagination free rein as she writes from Isabella's perspective. As an intrepid young newlywed from New York, Isabella is hurt by the frostiness of her wealthy husband's conservative social circle. She hopes that motherhood will make her more acceptable, but tragedy strikes. The cure, she decides, is to unleash her energies and throw off the chains of sexism. She finds a sense of purpose in her travels and in acquiring rare books and art. Franklin orchestrates interactions with invented characters and such historic figures as Charles Eliot Norton, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Berthe Morisot, and Bernard Berenson as Isabella becomes a virtuoso of the witty riposte, a foe of intolerance, and a champion of art and freedom. A lusciously well-written, amusing, and involving improvisation on an endlessly intriguing figure.

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