|
LET'S HEAR IT FOR THE MUSES: WIVES, MOTHERS, SISTERS, DAUGHTERS
|
|
fiction about women we know (or think we know) in the orbit of famous men |
|
|
by Shana Abâe
She was a vivacious teenage socialite suddenly and unexpectedly thrust into fame simply for falling in love with a famous man nearly three decades her senior.
|
|
|
by Tessa Arlen
Lucy Duff Gordon knows she is talented. She sees color, light, and texture in ways few people can begin to imagine. But is the male dominated world of haute couture, who would use her art for their own gain, ready for her?
|
|
|
by Stephanie Barron
Wealthy, privileged, and fiercely independent New Yorker Jennie Jerome took Victorian England by storm when she landed on its shores. As Lady Randolph Churchill, she gave birth to a man who defined the twentieth century- her son Winston. But Jennie-reared in the luxury of Gilded Age Newport and the Paris of the Second Empire-lived an outrageously modern life all her own, filled with controversy, passion, tragedy, and triumph.
|
|
|
by Louis Bayard
About to turn 21 when she arrives in Springfield in 1839, Mary Todd teeters on the brink of old-maidenhood. She's too sharp-tongued and politically astute for the town's eligible men, including, she thinks regretfully, handsome merchant Joshua Speed, whom she initially finds more charming than his friend Lincoln, who is as tongue-tied with ladies as he is plainspokenly eloquent at the Illinois statehouse.
|
|
|
by Marie Benedict
Mitza Maric has always been a little different from other girls. Most twenty-year-olds are wives by now, not studying physics at an elite Zurich university with only male students trying to outdo her clever calculations. But Mitza is smart enough to know that, for her, math is an easier path than marriage. And then fellow student Albert Einstein takes an interest in her, and the world turns sideways.
|
|
|
by Mollie Cox Bryan
Eliza Hamilton's eighteen-year-old son, Alexander Jr., was seen fighting with a man in a tavern the night before his father's duel and quickly comes under suspicion for murder when the man turns up dead. Eliza searches for ways to clear her son's name, even as she is grieving, but as she combs through her late husband's papers, she finds evidence of a plot to steal money from the government during his tenure as secretary of state.
|
|
|
by Lynn Cullen
But Dorothy Horstmann is not focused on beating her colleagues to the (polio) vaccine. She just wants the world to have a cure. Applying the same determination that lifted her from a humble background as the daughter of immigrants, to becoming a doctor -often the only woman in the room -- she hunts down the monster where it lurks- in the blood.
|
|
|
by C. W. Gortner
Daughter of New York financier Leonard Jerome, Jennie was born into wealth - and scandal. Upon her parents' separation, her mother took Jennie and her sisters to Paris, where Mrs. Jerome was determined to marry her daughters into the most elite families.
|
|
|
by Alice Hoffman
A forbidden love story set on the tropical island of St. Thomas about the extraordinary woman who gave birth to painter Camille Pissarro, the Father of Impressionism.
|
|
|
by Nancy Horan
Fact and fiction blend in a historical novel that chronicles the relationship between seminal architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney, from their meeting, when they were each married to another, to the clandestine affair that shocked Chicago society.
|
|
|
by Christina Baker Kline
Imagines the life story of Christina Olson, the subject of Andrew Wyeth's painting "Christina's World," describing the simple life she led on a remote Maine farm, her complicated relationship with her family, and the illness that incapacitated her.
|
|
|
by Elizabeth Letts
Hollywood, 1938: As soon as she learns that M-G-M is adapting her late husband's masterpiece for the screen, seventy-seven-year-old Maud Gage Baum sets about trying to finagle her way onto the set. Nineteen years after Frank's passing, Maud is the only person who can help the producers stay true to the spirit of the book -- because she's the only one left who knows its secrets.
|
|
|
by Ann Mah
Socially poised but financially precarious, and all too aware of her mother's expectations that she make a brilliant match, Jacqueline Bouvier has one year to herself to explore and absorb the luminous beauty of the City of Light.
|
|
|
by Paula McLain
A powerful novel of the stormy marriage between Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, a fiercely independent woman who became one of the greatest war correspondents of the twentieth century.
|
|
|
by Maggie O'Farrell
Florence, the 1550s. Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke, is comfortable with her obscure place in the palazzo: free to wonder at its treasures, observe its clandestine workings, and devote herself to her own artistic pursuits. But when her older sister dies on the eve of her wedding to the ruler of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, Lucrezia is thrust unwittingly into the limelight: the duke is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father just as quick to accept on her behalf.
|
|
|
by Whitney Scharer
In 1929, Lee Miller went to Paris to start over, to make art instead of being made into it. She soon catches the eye of the famous Surrealist Man Ray. Though he wants to use her only as a model, Lee convinces him to take her on as his assistant and teach her everything he knows.
|
|
|
by John Burnham Schwartz
Fact and fiction mingle seamlessly in a story of the defection and lonely wanderings of Josef Stalin's only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, beginning with her arrival in New York City after having defected from the Soviet Union in 1967.
|
|
|
by Mary Sharratt
Alma Schindler enraptures every man she meets, including Gustav Klimt, Alexander von Zemlinsky, and Walter Gropius. Yet composer Gustav Mahler is the one the beautiful socialite chooses. Twenty years Alma's senior, he forbids her own composing, subordinating her gifts to service his ego.
|
|
|
by Twan Eng Tan
A mesmerizingly beautiful novel based on real events, this book traces the fault lines of race, gender, sexuality, and power under empire, and dives deep into the complicated nature of love and friendship in its shadow.
|
|
|
by Stephanie Thornton
Jackie accompanies JFK to Dallas and their thousand days of magic come to an abrupt and devastating end--forcing Jackie to pick up the ruined fragments of her life and forge a triumphant new identity.
|
|
Maybe this list isn't your jam. Check out the RPL Readers page for more lists. Or, if you'd prefer a hand-crafted, bespoke book suggestion list, try The Bookologist service. You need an RPL Library card to access. Don't have one? Find out how to get one here.
|
|
|
|
|
|