A historian uncovers the long-running affair between a famous 19th century author and a female conservationist—through love letters written in code. The Unitarian minister, author, and peace activist Edward Everett Hale was one of the most respected moral leaders of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Yet, for twenty-five years, he lived a double life. Harriet Freeman worked for a time as Hale’s secretary, but as they make abundantly clear in some 3,000 love letters, they were also lovers—and perhaps even soul mates. Hale’s many biographers depicted his marriage as unerringly faithful, despite the available evidence to the contrary. Now historian Sara Day corrects the record with this fascinating chronicle of Hale and Freeman’s secret romance. With extensive research into the lives of both figures, Day also succeeds in cracking the lovers’ code.
In 1888, young Helen Keller traveled to Boston with her teacher, Annie Sullivan, where they met a man who would change her life: Boston Transcript columnist and editor Joseph Edgar Chamberlin. Throughout her childhood and young adult years, Keller spent weekends and holidays at Red Farm, the Chamberlins' home in Wrentham, Massachusetts, a bustling environment where avant-garde writers, intellectuals, and social reformers of the day congregated. Keller eventually called Red Farm home for a year when she was sixteen. Informed by previously unpublished letters and extensive research, Letters from Red Farm explores for the first time Keller's deep and enduring friendship with the man who became her literary mentor and friend for over forty years. Written by Chamberlin's great-great granddaughter, this engaging story imparts new insights into Keller's life and personality, introduces the irresistible Chamberlin to a modern public, and follows Keller's burgeoning interest in social activism, as she took up the causes of disability rights, women's issues, and pacifism.
"Founded in the late nineteenth century, the Women's National Indian Association was one of several reform associations that worked to implement the government's assimilation policy directed at Native peoples. While male reformers worked primarily in the political arena, the women of the WNIA combined political action with efforts to improve health and home life and spread Christianity on often remote reservations. During its more than seventy-year history, the WNIA established over sixty missionary sites in which they provided Native peoples with home-building loans, supported the work of government teachers and field matrons, founded schools, built missionary cottages and chapels, and worked toward the realization of reservation hospitals. Gender, Race, and Power in the Indian Reofrm Movement reveals the complicated intersections of gender, race, and identity at the heart of Indian reform. Using gender as a lens of analysis, this collection of original essays offers a new interpretation of the WNIA's founding, arguing that the WNIA provided opportunities for Indigenous women to advance their own agendas, creates a new space in the public sphere for white women, and reveals the WNIA's role in broader national debates centered on Indian land rights and the political power of Christian reform"--
A history of American women challenging domesticity by touring Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The nineteenth-century ideal of domesticity identified home as women’s proper sphere, but the ideal was frequently challenged, profoundly so when woman left home and country to travel in foreign lands. This book explores the reasons for and ramifications of women making a Grand Tour, a trip to Europe, between 1814 and 1914; this century between major European wars witnessed the golden age of American Grand Tours. Men and women alike were inspired by a Euro-centric education that valued the Old World as the fountainhead of their civilization. Reaching Europe necessitated an Ocean crossing, a disorienting time taking women far from domestic comfort. Once abroad, American women had to juggle accustomed norms of behavior with the demands of travel and customs of foreign lands. Wearing proper attire, even when hiking in the Alps, coping with unfamiliar languages, grappling with ever-changing rules about customs and passports, traveling alone—these were just some of the challenges women faced when traveling. Some traveled with their husband, others with female relatives and friends and a few entirely alone. Traveling companions had to agree on where to stay, when and where to dine, how to travel, and where to go. The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 made clear that even in the twentieth century, a Grand Tour involved risk. Because more women survived then men, some insisted that the Titanic’s example should curb female independence. However, a growing number of women continued making a Grand Tour for the next two year. It was the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 that temporarily brought an end to a century of female Grand Tours. “Beatty’s ability to weave the experiences of hundreds of American women on the Grand Tour in Europe into a consistent narrative is per se a remarkable feat. But the author does much more than that. She uses the “journey” as trope to represent the long and difficult process of women’s emancipation, in its several cultural, psychological, social, and political dimensions.” —Susanna Delfino, Professor of American History, retired. University of Genoa, Italy
This book provides new and exciting interpretations of Helen Keller's unparalleled life as "the most famous American woman in the world" during her time, celebrating the 141st anniversary of her birth. Helen Keller: A Life in American History explores Keller's life, career as a lobbyist, and experiences as a deaf-blind woman within the context of her relationship with teacher-guardian-promoter Anne Sullivan Macy and overarching social history. The book tells the dual story of a pair struggling with respective disabilities and financial hardship and the oppressive societal expectations set for women during Keller's lifetime. This narrative is perhaps the most comprehensive study of Helen Keller's role in the development of support services specifically related to the deaf-blind, as delineated as different from the blind. Readers will learn about Keller's challenges and choices as well as how her public image often eclipsed her personal desires to live independently. Keller's deaf-blindness and hard-earned but limited speech did not define her as a human being as she explored the world of ideas and wove those ideas into her writing, lobbying for funds for the American Federation for the Blind and working with disabled activists and supporters to bring about practical help during times of tremendous societal change.
Between 1982 and 1989, Pelafina H. Lièvre sent her son, Johnny Truant, a series of letters from The Three Attic Whalestoe Institute, a psychiatric facility in Ohio where she spent the final years of her life. Beautiful, heartfelt, and tragic, this correspondence reveals the powerful and deeply moving relationship between a brilliant though mentally ill mother and the precocious, gifted young son she never ceases to love. Originally contained within the monumental House of Leaves, this collection stands alone as a stunning portrait of mother and child. It is presented here along with a foreword by Walden D. Wyhrta and eleven previously unavailable letters.
Love in the Post (2013) is inspired by Jacques Derrida’s book The Post Card. Like the book, the film plays with fact and fiction, weaving together the stories of a scholar of literature and a film director, alongside insights from critics and philosophers. Theo Marks works in a university department that is soon to be closed. His wife Sophie, enigmatic and distant, is in analysis. Filmmaker Joanna struggles to make a film about The Post Card. These people are set on a collision course prompted by a series of letters that will change their lives. The film features a never before seen interview with Derrida, alongside contributions from Geoff Bennington, Ellen Burt, Catherin Malabou, J. Hillis Miller and Samuel Weber. Alongside the original screenplay, Martin McQuillan provides an extended commentary on Derrida’s original text, the film and its making. Joanna Callaghan reflects on her practice as a filmmaker and her engagement with philosophy as a director. The volume concludes with interviews between McQuillan and five leading Derrida scholars.
Delve deeper into the world of the BBC hit drama series Versailles, and discover the real Marie-Antoinette in this ground-breaking study of her secret love affair with the Swedish diplomat Count Axel von Fersen. For the first time an historian has compiled all the known letters between Swedish count Axel von Fersen and Marie-Antoinette, including six letters never before published. With unprecedented access to French and Swedish archives, Evelyn Farr has proven beyond doubt one of history's greatest romances. Axel von Fersen was Queen Marie-Antoinette's lover and loyal counsellor who gave her political advice from 1785 to the fall of the French monarchy at the time of the French Revolution. He organized the Royal Family's escape from Paris in 1791. Evelyn Farr's revelatory work on the subject also goes some way to proving that Count Fersen was in fact the biological father of Marie Antoinette's two younger children. Farr unveils the logistics and practicalities behind the romance; the use of code and invisible ink, the role of intermediaries, secret seals, double envelopes, codenames and the location of Fersen's clandestine lodgings at Versailles. I Love You Madly is a meticulously researched and enjoyable study of a forbidden love at a time of revolution. The letters portray a rebellious and independent queen who risked everything and broke all the rules to love the man who succeeded in conquering her heart.
Edgar Allan Poe has long been viewed as an artist who was hopelessly out of step with his time. But as Terence Whalen shows, America's most celebrated romantic outcast was in many ways the nation's most representative commercial writer. Whalen explores the antebellum literary environment in which Poe worked, an environment marked by economic conflict, political strife, and widespread foreboding over the rise of a mass audience. The book shows that the publishing industry, far from being a passive backdrop to writing, threatened to dominate all aspects of literary creation. Faced with financial hardship, Poe desperately sought to escape what he called "the magazine prison-house" and "the horrid laws of political economy." By placing Poe firmly in economic context, Whalen unfolds a new account of the relationship between literature and capitalism in an age of momentous social change. The book combines pathbreaking historical research with innovative literary theory. It includes the first fully-documented account of Poe's response to American slavery and the first exposé of his plot to falsify circulation figures. Whalen also provides a new explanation of Poe's ambivalence toward nationalism and exploration, a detailed inquiry into the conflict between cryptography and common knowledge, and a general theory of Poe's experiments with new literary forms such as the detective story. Finally, Whalen shows how these experiments are directly linked to the dawn of the information age. This book redefines Poe's place in American literature and casts new light on the emergence of a national culture before the Civil War.
Inquisitive and observant, Dora dreams of escaping her aristocratic country life to solve mysteries alongside Sherlock Holmes. So when she learns that the legendary detective might be her biological father, Dora jumps on the opportunity to travel to London and enlist his help in solving the mystery of her cousin's ransomed love letters. But Dora arrives in London to devastating news: Sherlock Holmes is dead. Her dreams dashed, Dora is left to rely on her wits-and the assistance of an attractive yet enigmatic young detective-to save her cousin's reputation and help rescue a kidnapped heiress along the way. Steeped in Victorian atmosphere and intrigue, this gripping novel heralds the arrival of a fresh new voice in young adult literature.
