Blindspot - Hardcover

Kamensky, Jane; Lepore, Jill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385526199 ISBN 13: 9780385526197

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau, 2008

Synopsis

“Tis a small canvas, this Boston,” muses Stewart Jameson, a Scottish portrait painter who, having fled his debtors in Edinburgh, has washed up on America’s far shores. Eager to begin anew in this new world, he advertises for an apprentice, but the lad who comes knocking is no lad at all. Fanny Easton is a lady in disguise, a young, fallen woman from Boston’s most prominent family. “I must make this Jameson see my artist’s touch, but not my woman’s form,” Fanny writes, in a letter to her best friend. “I would turn my talent into capital, and that capital into liberty.”

Liberty is what everyone’s seeking in boisterous, rebellious Boston on the eve of the American Revolution. But everyone suffers from a kind of blind spot, too. Jameson, distracted by his haunted past, can’t see that Fanny is a woman; Fanny, consumed with her own masquerade, can’t tell that Jameson is falling in love with her. The city’s Sons of Liberty can’t quite see their way clear, either. “Ably do they see the shackles Parliament fastens about them,” Jameson writes, “but to the fetters they clasp upon their own slaves, they are strangely blind.”

Written with wit and exuberance by longtime friends and accomplished historians Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore, Blindspot weaves together invention with actual historical documents in an affectionate send-up of the best of eighteenth-century fiction, from epistolary novels like Richardson’s Clarissa to Sterne’s picaresque Tristram Shandy. Prodigiously learned, beautifully crafted, and lush with the bawdy, romping sensibility of the age, Blindspot celebrates the art of the Enlightenment and the passion of the American Revolution by telling stories we know and those we don’t, stories of the everyday lives of ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary time.

About this title

Review:

"A lusty romance, a murder mystery and a bit of Americana, all rolled into one big, fat historical romp . . . Lepore and Kamensky have re-created a fascinating world and brought history hotly alive."--San Francisco Chronicle

"An erudite and entertaining re-creation of colonial America on the brink of the Revolution."--New York Times Book Review

"Both frisky and learned . . . a treat."--Washington Post

"A rip-roaring yarn, a real romp . . . It's fantastic--the romance novel of your dreams."--Newsday

"A droll, edifying novel . . . Not since John Barth . . . has anyone rendered colonial America in such exquisite satirical strokes. Blindspot succeeds as raw entertainment; better, it soars as cunning academic revisionism."--Chicago Tribune

"A very smart book . . . [Blindspot] captures Colonial America's wit and vulgarity, its sensibility, sensuality and snobbery."--San Diego Union-Tribune

About the Author:

Jane Kamensky is a professor of American history and chair of the History Department at Brandeis University. She is the author of The Exchange Artist and Governing the Tongue, among other books. Her scholarship has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is currently writing a biography of the eighteenth-century American portrait painter Gilbert Stuart. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and two sons.

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University, where she is the chair of the History and Literature Program. She is also a regular contributor to The New Yorker. Her books include The Name of War and A Is for American. Her most recent book, New York Burning, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband, three sons, and an extraordinarily large and formidable dog of entirely mysterious extraction.

About this edition

• Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0385526199
• ISBN 13: 9780385526197
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 500