IT GIRL

A somewhat fictionalized account of “Gibson Girl” Evelyn Nesbit’s tumultuous fortunes, with a wholly invented ending worthy of the protagonist’s talents.

In recent years we’ve seen a lot of attention given to the highborn and/or very rich of the late-19th and early-20th centuries: Think Downton Abbey, The Gilded Age, The Buccaneers, many of them focused on privileged and protected young women. Author Pataki has chosen to focus instead on a singular girl, Evelyn Talbot, originally from the mining town of Tarentum, Pennsylvania, whose stunning beauty leads her to work as an artist’s model by age 13: First for a Pittsburgh painter named Leah Dawson, then posing as an angel for a Louis Comfort Tiffany window, and eventually inspiring Charles Dana Gibson’s drawing Woman: The Eternal Question, with the pouf-y hairstyle that fixed “The Gibson Girl” in history. Evelyn’s surname has been changed from her real one of Nesbit, and a few other historical figures have also been renamed, because this Evelyn’s trajectory will deliberately vary from her historical counterpart’s. Her ambition and the family’s financial precarity lead her to audition for stage roles, eventually becoming a sought-after singer, dancer, and actor who attracts the attention of men and women—and in the rigid society of the early 1900s, she receives scores of offers from men wishing to “protect” her. Evelyn and her mother experience both great luxury and terrible treatment at the hands of powerful men, first Stanley Pierce (based on celebrated architect Stanford White) and then Hal Thorne (based on playboy Harry Thaw), whose lives become entangled and end tragically. Evelyn’s alternate fate might be a feminist sleight of hand, yet as an author’s note explains, “What if I give Evelyn the opportunity to reclaim her own agency, even to rewrite her own ending?” It’s a worthy goal for a novel, and ultimately a very satisfying one, as well.

Each character comes alive in this rich, dynamic novel.