The life of a late 19th century American woman who married wealthy like Isabella Stewart Gardner was apparently all about parties, international travel and art collecting. I was asked to read and review The Lioness of Boston by Emily Franklin and was provided with a free copy from the publisher via Edelweiss.
I did like Isabella's insight that "servant life is female life" though that wouldn't have been true for Isabella. It's the women who couldn't afford servants who had to do all the household labor and cater to the needs of the men in the household.
Isabella also was critical of Frozen Charlottes which were cake decorations that represented a girl who had frozen to death on Boston Common. I suppose it could be regarded as a memorial to the poor child, but Isabella knew the upper crust of her day well. They weren't humane people. The cake decoration was probably intended to cruelly poke fun at her. Laughing at those who are less fortunate was a recreation for the privileged.
Isabella met the female impressionist artist, Berthe de Morisot. I've heard of Morisot, but this is the first time I'd seen her as a character in a novel. Yet it seemed that her main role was to introduce Isabella to male impressionists. Critics called her work "domestic". Morisot felt affronted by that evaluation. She didn't paint household scenes. She had been a nature painter. It's likely that these "critics" hadn't actually seen any of Morisot's work. They just imagined that a woman painter would necessarily be confined to domestic subjects. They revealed their contempt for women in general through their denigration of Morisot.
Of the male painters that Isabella encountered, James McNeill Whistler seemed the most interesting to me. Isabella noted that Whistler had such a clean smock, and called him "as clean as a banker". Whistler responded cynically that "Bankers are not clean." This is probably intended as a metaphorical statement about corruption in that profession during the late 19th century.
The artist John Singer Sargent painted Isabella's portrait more than once. It interested me that he chose to paint her as an old woman. It also surprised me that Isabella wanted a portrait of herself when she was old. Most women wouldn't want to gaze at an image of themselves when they were "past their prime" according to the dictates of society.
A lesbian personality of the time, Violet Paget, told Isabella in this book that everyone is born at the wrong time. That's not what I've observed. It seems to me that most people are conventional and definitely suited to their social context. If that weren't the case, conventional expectations wouldn't exist and no one would be defined as unconventional as Isabella evidently was.
By the way, if this post is reported to Blogger as having "inappropriate" content resulting in a warning being posted by Blogger, I would at least understand why that happened. There are probably people out there, who don't think I should mention lesbian characters or even acknowledge that lesbians exist. Yet I do consider such warnings a type of censorship.
In The Lioness of Boston, it's mentioned that Isabella met the poet Robert Browning in 1888 and obtained a lock of his hair. There is a photo of Browning from that year illustrating his Wikipedia article here and he doesn't appear to have had very much hair at that point in his life. I would think that he couldn't have spared a lock.
I was interested to learn that in real life thieves broke into the museum that Isabella established and stole three of the paintings. I hope that those paintings are eventually found and restored to the collection.
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