“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friends and accomplished historians Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore, Blindspot weaves together invention with actual historical documents in an affectionate send-up of the best of eighteenth-century fiction, from epistolary novels like Richardson’s Clarissa to Sterne’s picaresque Tristram Shandy.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.

"Professors Kamensky and Lepore try for playful historical romance, but deliver instead a novel that is, if rich in period detail, also overwrought, predictably plotted and at times embarrassingly purple. The year is 1764 and portrait painter Stewart Jameson has been chased by debtors from his native Scotland to Boston, where he quickly opens shop and takes an apprentice, the half-starved orphan, Francis Weston, who turns out to be Fanny Easton, the disgraced daughter of one of Boston's leading citizens. Stewart does a good business with Boston's better class, which puts Stewart and Fanny in a good position to solve the murder of an abolitionist. They are joined at this task by Stewart's old friend from Edinburgh, Dr. Ignatius Alexander, a university-trained runaway slave. The mystery plays out with little surprise; rather, the narrative is driven by Alexander's hatred of slavery and by Stewart and Fanny's tawdry relationship. Unfortunately, however, both of these lines prove awkward, and while students of the era may find enough period detail to carry them through, the cheesy plot and facile characterizations are likely to turn off most readers." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Blindspot" is a novel both frisky and learned. You know you're in for a treat when you read one of the blurbs on the back of the jacket: "'A most inimitable performance. Who is he, what is he, that could write so excellent a Book?' — John PUFF, the prolific author of very many eighteenth-century blurbs." Set in pre-revolutionary New England, in the year 1764, and narrated in the style of an 18th-century... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) novel, "Blindspot" was written by two historians who are lifelong friends. They must have had a wonderful time putting this good-natured project together.

Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore write about a time when Boston was a town of around 20,000 souls; when many people, if not most of the white populace, owned African slaves as personal servants; when the British government was tightening the screws by imposing exorbitant taxes on sugar and stamps (everything that was sold, more or less, had to have a stamp on it, and the proceeds swelled the coffers of the king). This was a time when many colonists began to rumble in protest: Were they free British citizens, with all the rights that entailed, or were they merely second-class colonials, to have their wealth stripped from them as fast as they could create it? Some Bostonians were beginning to cry out for real freedom, even as they greedily held on to their own slaves, and the whole idea of slavery, as a form of order and even patriotism.

Our hero here is Stewart Jameson, portraitist — or, as they were called in that day, face-painter — who has been forced to leave England in a hurry, under the threat of debtors' prison. He is referred to as a gambler and a libertine in the "Wanted" notices that follow him across the Atlantic, but in fact he is a good man with a huge capacity for friendship and love. He has incurred an enormous debt, it's true, but for the noblest of reasons.

Eventually, he will meet a fetching young lady with enough pluck for an army of plucky heroines. Fanny Easton, daughter of a stuffy and prominent Boston family, had earlier carelessly allowed herself to become impregnated by her painting instructor. In one of the first of many misunderstandings that inform the structure of this book, she comes to believe that her nefarious instructor was also consorting with a beautiful house slave, Hannah. Fanny's baby is stillborn (maybe), and the new mother flees her father's house to become, for a while, a girl of the street, only to end up in a ghastly workhouse for fallen women. Somehow, she comes across an ad in the Boston newspaper: There's someone out there seeking a face-painter's apprentice. She has the talent and ambition to fit the bill, and soon begins a new life, disguised as a boy, Francis Weston, employed now by the artist Stewart Jameson, who, though he's always thought of himself as a manly sort, becomes swiftly and guiltily enchanted by the "boy" who works for him.

A third character turns up: an African of slave parentage who, on a bet, has been raised with a white man's education in England. Dr. Ignatius Alexander is both madly erudite and furious about the injustices of slavery. He's an old friend of Jameson's. But is he a free man or a runaway slave? It depends on whom you ask.

Trouble is brewing in the Colonies. A certain Samuel Bradstreet has been campaigning for freedom from British rule and also freedom for slaves — a position that has made him both deeply loved and hated in the town. He's been looking a little green around the gills for quite some time. In fact he's being slowly poisoned, and half of Boston, including his virago wife, may be guilty of this crime. When Bradstreet finally does expire, Jameson, the open-hearted face-painter (Weston, the apprentice in disguise) and Dr. Alexander, the "African genius," contrive to discover who has carried out this murder of so fine a man.

Of course the fourth major character here is Boston itself, at a time when Holyoke was a person instead of a college, when felons were burned at the stake for their infractions, when rebellious slaves were hanged and then left in cages so that the crows could pick their bones. Most of the tropes of 18th-century melodrama appear here: those constant misunderstandings, the idea that people you've known for years can remain disguised for months at a time and you'll never notice; missing babies; long-lost foundlings; sudden surprises; contorted explanations. Kamensky and Lepore even carry on at an 18th-century length, which doesn't serve "Blindspot" all that well. Being sprightly for close to 500 pages is harder than it might first seem, and even the most avid reader may begin to flag toward the end. But what an engaging way to relearn American history! And how amazing (and more than a little sad) to realize that we, as a country, are plagued by many of the same conundrums — pervasive racism, class distrust, venal officials — now as we were then.

Reviewed by Carolyn See, who may be reached at www.carolynsee.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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“Blindspot pulls of the dazzling feat of being as sexy as it is political, as accurate as it is outrageous, and as unsentimental as it is moving. Not just a novel with an eighteenth-century setting, but as smart and funny as the best of eighteenth-century novels; Henry Fielding would go green with envy, then buy copies for all his friends. Huzza, huzza!”

Emma Donoghue, author of Landing, Slammerkin, and Hood

“Bawdy and beguiling, suspenseful and tender, Blindspot is a continual seduction; this is historical fiction at its most erotic.”

Rebecca Stott, author of Ghostwalk

Written with wit and exuberance by longtime friends and accomplished historians, Blindspot is at once fiction and history, mystery and love story, tragedy and farce. Set in boisterous, rebellious Boston on the eve of the American Revolution, it ingeniously weaves together the fictional stories of a Scottish portrait painter and notorious libertine Stewart Jameson, and Fanny Easton, a fallen woman from one of Boston's most powerful families who disguises herself as a boy to become Jameson's defiant and seductive apprentice, Francis Weston.

When Boston's revolutionary leader, Samuel Bradstreet, dies suddenly on the day Jameson is to paint his portrait, Bradstreet's slaves are accused of murder. Jameson, Weston, and the brilliant African-born Oxford-educated doctor Ignatius Alexander set out to determine the truth. What they discover turns topsy-turvy everything you thought you knew about the Founding Fathers.

Peopled not only with the celebrated Sons of Liberty but also with revolutionary Boston's unsung inhabitants--women and servants, hawkers and rogues and pickpockets--Blindspot is both prodigiously learned and lush with the bawdy sensibility of the eighteenth century. It restores the humanity, the humor, and the sex to the story of the American Revolution.

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.