Vivid popular history illuminating some neglected feminist pioneers.
A lively group portrait of 18th-century Englishwomen who claimed a place for themselves in the nation’s intellectual life.
Most of these “bluestockings” (not a pejorative term until much later) were aristocrats, privileged enough to have leisure time to devote to reading and writing. Working-class poet Ann Yearsley, wife of a yeoman who had fallen on hard times, and playwright/religious author Hannah More, middle-class daughter of a schoolteacher, were the exceptions—and More’s patronizing treatment of Yearsley demonstrated that the bluestockings may have defied intellectual restrictions but did not question the class system. Gibson, the author of The Spirit of Inquiry, begins with Elizabeth Montagu, whose salon on Hill Street in London was a favored gathering place of intellectual women, equaled in brilliance only by Hester Thrale’s salon, which orbited around literary lion Samuel Johnson. Thrale and Montagu were friends, and most women in their elite orbit socialized with both, among them classicist Elizabeth Carter and Hester Mulso Chapone, who gained early fame for cautiously feminist letters written to Samuel Richardson in defense of a woman’s right to choose a husband. Gibson offers vivid sketches of all these women, and many others, in a loosely structured narrative that first introduces Montagu and other key players, then uses individual lives to explore common aspects of all female experience in chapters devoted to marriage, motherhood, friendship, and love, with a final chapter showing how some bluestockings maneuvered through social strictures to gain independence. The author does not scant the difficulties these women faced; the account of Thrale’s constant pregnancies (15 in 16 years) and the frequent deaths of her children (only three remained alive in 1776) is particularly grim. The author’s engaging account honors the determination and charm with which her subjects seized as much freedom as society would allow them.
Vivid popular history illuminating some neglected feminist pioneers.Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780393881387
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1174
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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