Emily Franklin

Isabella Stewart Gardener was a New Yorker who lived in Boston after her marriage to a local Brahmin. Ostracized by the society matrons for her brash ways, Isabella sought to find and make her own path. Slowly she began a life of collecting—plants, books, art, and always men&mdashculminating in the creation of the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum.

The epigraph to this novel is a quote by ISG herself: "Don't spoil a good story by telling the truth", and in the author's notes, Franklin admits to having followed that maxim much more faithfully than history itself. The author fabricated all of the many letters included in the novel, as well as attendance at events, meetings with famed literati, etc. in the spirit of telling a good story. Perhaps she succeeded, but I was too busy trying to suss out fact from fiction to care. I prefer my historical fiction to embellish history but not fabricate it. Others love the "spirit" of the book and are willing to overlook historical errors that I am not. Your mileage may vary.… (more)

Isabella Stewart Gardner moves to Boston as a young wife with her husband, Jack, and attempts to make her way in the social milieu. She is a opinionated woman who doesn't always fit in, and as written by Franklin, struggles with feeling left out and less than quite a bit before she begins to make her own group of friends and find her way of making her mark through collecting.

This biographical fiction covers the years 1861 to 1903 when the now-famous Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was open to the public. Interspersed is the Prologue and "Intermezzos" written by Isabella in 1924 to an unnamed friend with instructions to burn letters and leave everything in the museum untouched, as well as reflecting on events from a more mature perspective. The beginning chapters, focusing on only four years, are the most detailed and cohesive; after that, I began to feel like I was just reading vignettes in each chapter, glimpses of a life and imagined letters rather than a whole, complete story. I suppose that's part of the difficulty in writing about Isabella herself - she did indeed burn letters, but left the museum as she had curated it to the city of Boston as her legacy.

Franklin chooses to focus a lot on Isabella's imagined desires, whether for a child, or friendship, or in an affair, and I found myself impatient in the repetition of her feelings of lacking when she seems to me such a bold figure who didn't really care what other people thought. Because less time is spent on her later years, this woman is less clear than the youthful one unsure of her place in society. There's also no mention of her husband Jack's paying someone to fight the Civil War in his place, the fact that some of the art she acquired was smuggled, or the moral questions of whether national treasures should become part of a personal collection (indeed, the actual accumulation of the art is described mostly in letters, without a lot of details given). These, to me, would have made much more interesting reading.… (more)

This is an indepth look at high society in Boston and how Isabella Stewart Gardner did not fit it. She bet out the snobs. In the end, she had her own very impressive museum that stands today!

A wonderful story of snobs that looked down on her. She didn't fit in, and while originally it bothered her, she decised to live her own life on her own terms.

Sadly, her only child, a little boy, died at age two. Her grief was sever. She travled to Asia and throughout Europe, where she became froms with Henry Janes, John Singer Sargent and Oscar Wilde as well as a host of other notables.

She was quite eccentric and lived life as she saw it. She was indeed a trailablaizer, particularly in the art world where she began to collect many incredible paitings for her museum, still standing today in Boston, MA. She was painted by Sargent. Skipping the pinkies in the air society, after knowing she was not going to, nor did she want to belong to them, as the author notes, she was so interesting that she once walked a pair of lions in the Boston Public Garden!

Tragically in 1990, theives portraying as police entered her beautiful museum and took away with paintings that could never be replaced.

I very much liked this book, but felt it seemed to ramble mid way. In my opinion there were too many pages of repetitive events. I would have rated the book higher if not for the tendency to rooam too much.

3.5 stars… (more)

Kind of a memoir-as-novel, built around a cross-country road trip in which a mother and adult daughter redefine their relationship via a collection of mix tapes defining different periods in the daughter’s life. It’s an interesting device, but an ultimately limiting one, as the symbolism of the various tapes will be unclear to anyone not familiar with the artists and titles. There’s a rich portrait of the evolution of a family here, but Franklin loses points for a predictable, even sappy, ending.… (more)