"A searching, sensitive, and engagingly witty meditation." --Lyndall
Gordon
"What a great pleasure this gorgeous little book has given me! It should
be offered everywhere indeed, and at every museum shop on earth."--Honor
Moore
A fascinating meditation on art and personality, Patricia Vigderman's
exploration of Isabella Stewart Gardner's famous Boston museum radiates
out from its subject to investigate Garnder's legacy of luxury and
willfulness. Isabella Gardner's high spirits and aesthetic pleasure, her
women friends and female power, her friendships with the adventurers and
aesthetes of her world, are gathered into this engrossing investigation
of patronage and passion. Blending biography, memoir, philosophy, and
detective story, The Memory Palace is more than a tribute to the
museum and the woman; it is an altogether new genre. Vigderman's witty
and intimate quest for her subject sets a literary precedent for the
appreciation of artistic imagination. Loosening up the past, entering
its mysteries and its memories, she reminds us that we change our lives
when we begin a relationship with art.
Patricia Vigderman grew up in Washington, D.C., and Europe. She
graduated from Vassar College, after which a circuitous course led her
through editing, translating, freelance journalism, teaching, marriage,
motherhood, divorce, a doctoral dissertation (on nineteenth-century
novels as film, as history, and as autobiography), and a lot of time in
museums. Her recent writing has appeared in The Georgia Review, Harvard
Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review,
Northwest Review, Raritan, Seneca Review, and Southwest Review. She
divides her year between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Gambier, Ohio,
where she teaches in the English department at Kenyon College. She is
married to the writer Lewis Hyde.
