The Lioness of Boston

 

 

 

The Lioness of Boston  (2023)

By Emily Franklin 

Godline, 369 pages

★★★

 

 

When you enter the Gardner Museum in Boston you step inside the realm of Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924). In The Lioness of Boston novelist Emily Franklin seeks to take us inside “Belle’s” mind. Lioness gathers steam with Belle’s marriage to to John “Jack” Lowell Gardner in 1860, then follows three prongs:  Belle’s problems with Boston Society, her nonconformist domestic life, and the philanthropic work for which she is best known.

 

The narrative structure follows a straight biographical line, the sort you could read in an encyclopedia. In such a structure, writers generally add speculative color to add drama. Franklin confines herself to invented dialogue, but this makes the book situationally claustrophobic. For example, one might expect a person married in 1860 to have something to say about the Civil War–even if she was just 20 at the time. Instead, Franklin’s centerpiece is the rigidity of Boston Society after the Civil War. 

 

It might surprise those who think of Boston as a bastion of liberalism to discover that it was once one of the most uptight cities in America. This is particularly true for member of the upper classes who feared anything vaguely unorthodox. If you have read the book or seen the movie The Age of Innocence you know that upper-class Brahmin society was rooted in Protestantism, conservatism, and nativism. They Brahmins were obsessed with propriety to the point of scripting how people men and women were to behave. Business and the public realm was for men; women, the “weaker” sex, were relegated to socializing with other women and taking care of children and households. 

 

This was burdensome to Belle Gardner, born into a rich, cosmopolitan New York family and whose adolescent education took place abroad. Imagine being deemed odd because you asked an architect to put different colored bricks and an arch in the pathway to your house. For quite some time, Belle’s only confidants were Jack and his sister Julia, whom she met when they were students in Paris. Alas, both Belle’s infant son and Julia died in 1865. Scandalmongers chalked up Belle’s subsequent miscarriage and breakdown to her bohemian ways. Never mind that Belle later became a good caregiver to three nephews.

 

At the Gardner Museum you will find a Venetian villa in the courtyard. That's because Belle felt much more comfortable in Italy than she did in Boston. In Franklin’s telling, Belle had to flee Boston to find her authentic self.  She and Jack spent many years traveling and living in Europe. As if she hadn't scandalized Boston society enough, imagine what “proper” Bostonians made of eccentric friends such as Bernard Berenson, Oscar Wilde, and James Whistler. Belle collected offbeat artists, unorthodox architects, and book antiquarians the way one might collect Pokémon cards. It would be fair to say that she found more kinship among them.   

 

Technically, Belle lived on Beacon Hill, but her intellect resided with the rare books, classical European art , and objects from the Near East that she collected. These, of course, became the foundation of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Today, many of the paintings and objects are in exactly the position in which she placed them. 

 

Here's a rub of readers. How much do you care about the travails of the upper class? For all Belle’s struggles, she was born into money, married into money, and died with more money. Franklin does a superb job of shining light on the snobbery of Boston society, but this too is something easily discovered. It’s an unfair comparison; but this was novelist Edith Wharton’s forte.  

 

Isabella Stewart Gardener is indeed fascinating, but sometimes The Lioness of Boston seems a souped-up encyclopedia entry. More engagement with the outside world would have helped, as would greater development to Jack’s character to imbue him with more depth than a yes-man appendage to Belle’s discontent. Do not misunderstand me, if you don't know much about Gardner, you should read The Lioness of Boston. My chief complaint is that too often the lioness is more like a declawed domestic cat then a ferocious beast. I wish that Franklin, like her protagonist, had been less orthodox. 

 

Rob Weir