Synopses & Reviews
chapter 1
9781400068166|excerpt
Vreeland: CLARA AND MR. TIFFANY
Peacock
I opened the beveled-glass door under the sign announcing Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company in ornate bronze. A new sign with a new name. Fine. I felt new too.
In the ground-floor showroom of the five-story building, stained-glass windows hung from the high ceiling, and large mosaic panels leaned against the walls. Despite the urgency of my business, I couldn’t resist taking a quick look at the free-form vases, bronze desk sets, pendulum clocks, and Art Nouveau candelabras. It was the oil lamps that bothered me. Their blown-glass shades sat above squat, bulbous bases too earthbound to be elegant. Mr. Tiffany was capable of more grace than that.
A new young floor manager tried to stop me at the marble stairway. I gave him a look that implied, I was here before you were born, and pushed his arm away as though it were a Coney Island turnstile.
On the second floor, I peered into Mr. Tiffany’s large office-studio. With a gardenia pinned to his lapel, he sat at his desk behind a row of potted orchids. In February, no less! Such were the extravagances of wealth. His formerly trim bottle brush of a mustache had sprouted into robust ram’s horns.
His own paintings hung on the walls—Citadel Mosque of Old Cairo, with tall, slender minarets, and Market Day at Tangier, with a high tower on a distant hill. A new one depicted a lily on a tall stalk lording over a much shorter one. Amusing. Little Napoléon’s self-conscious preoccupation with height was alive and well.
New tall pedestals draped with bedouin shawls flanked the fireplace. On them Oriental vases held peacock feathers. In this his design sense went awry, sacrificed to his flamboyancy. If he wanted to appear taller, the pedestals should have been shorter. Someday I would tell him.
“Excuse me.”
“Why, Miss Wolcott!”
“Mrs. Driscoll. I got married, you remember.”
“Oh, yes. You can’t be wanting employment, then. My policy hasn’t—”
I pulled back my shoulders. “As of two weeks ago, I’m a single woman again.”
He was too much the gentleman to ask questions, but he couldn’t hide the gleam in his eyes.
“I’ve come to inquire if you have work for me. That is, if my performance pleased you before.” A deliberate prompt. I didn’t want to be hired because of my need or his kindness. I wanted my talent to be the reason he wanted me back.
“Indeed” was all he offered.
What now to fill the suspended moment? His new projects. I asked. His eyebrows leapt up in symmetrical curves.
“A Byzantine chapel for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago next year. Four times bigger than the Paris Exposition Universelle. It will be the greatest assembly of artists since the fifteenth century.” He counted on his fingers and then drummed them on the desk. “Only fifteen months away. In 1893 the name of Louis Comfort Tiffany will be on the lips of millions!” He stood up and swung open his arms wide enough to embrace the whole world.
I sensed his open palm somewhere in the air behind the small of my back, ushering me to his massive, carved mahogany exhibit table to see his sketches and watercolors. “Two round windows, The Infancy of Christ and Botticelli’s Madonna and Child, will be set off by a dozen scenic side windows.”
A huge undertaking. How richly fortunate. Surely there would be opportunity for me to shine.
Practically hopping from side to side, he made a show of slinging down one large watercolor after another onto the Persian carpet, each one a precise, fine-edged rendering of what he wanted the window to be.
“Gracious! You’ve been on fire. Go slower! Give me a chance to admire each one.”
He unrolled the largest watercolor. “An eight-foot mosaic behind the altar depicting a pair of peacocks surrounded by grapevines.”
My breath whistled between my open lips. Above the peacocks facing each other, he had transformed the standard Christian icon of a crown of thorns into a shimmering regal headdress for God the King, the thorns replaced by large glass jewels in true Tiffany style.
Astonishing how he could get mere watercolors so deep and saturated, so like lacquer that they vibrated together as surely as chords of a great church pipe organ. Even the names of the hues bore an exotic richness. The peacocks’ necks in emerald green and sapphire blue. The tail feathers in vermilion, Spanish ocher, Florida gold. The jewels in the crown mandarin yellow and peridot. The background in turquoise and cobalt. Oh, to get my hands on those gorgeous hues. To feel the coolness of the blue glass, like solid pieces of the sea. To chip the gigantic jewels for the crown so they would sparkle and send out shafts of light. To forget everything but the glass before me and make of it something resplendent.
When I could trust my voice not to show too much eagerness, I said, “I see your originality is in good health. Only you would put peacocks in a chapel.”
“Don’t you know?” he said in a spoof of incredulity. “They symbolized eternal life in Byzantine art. Their flesh was thought to be incorruptible.”
“What a lucky find for you, that convenient tidbit of information.”
He chuckled, so I was on safe ground.
He tossed down more drawings. “A marble-and-mosaic altar surrounded by mosaic columns, and a baptismal font of opaque leaded glass and mosaic.”
“This dome is the lid of the basin? In opaque leaded glass?”
He looked at it with nothing short of love, and showed me its size with outstretched arms as though he were hugging the thing.
I was struck by a tantalizing idea. “Imagine it reduced in size and made of translucent glass instead. Once you figure how to secure the pieces in a dome, that could be the method and the shape of a lampshade. A wraparound window of, say”—I looked around the room—“peacock feathers.”
He jerked his head up with a startled expression, the idea dawning on him as if it were his own.
“Lampshades in leaded glass,” he said in wonder, his blue eyes sparking.
“Just think where that could go,” I whispered.
“I am. I am!” He tugged at his beard. “It’s brilliant! An entirely new product. We’ll be the first on the market. And not just peacock featherth. Flowerth too!”
Excitement overtook his struggle to control his lisp, which surfaced only when he spoke with passion.
“But the chapel first. This will be our secret for now.”
Men harboring secrets—I seemed attracted to them unwittingly.
“Besides the window department and the mosaic department, I have six women working on the chapel windows. I’ve always thought that women have greater sensitivity to nuances of color than men do. You’ve proved that yourself, so I want more women. You’ll be in charge of them.”
“That will suit me just fine.”
From the Hardcover edition.
Review
Praise for The House of Hawthorne "Bring[s] the brooding author and the idealistic artist brilliantly to life."—Amy Belding Brown, author of Flight of the Sparrow
Praise for Fallen Beauty
“Erika Robuck brings the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay to life in all her beauty and insatiability. This is an electrifying read, one that crackles with passion on every page.”—Alyson Richman, National Bestselling author of The Lost Wife
Praise for Call Me Zelda
“This gem of a novel spins a different, touching story.…You will love it, as I absolutely did.”—Tatiana de Rosnay, New York Times Bestselling Author of Sarahs Key
Praise for Hemingways Girl
“Youll love this robust, tender story of love, grief, and survival on Key West in the 1930s…addictive.”—Jenna Blum, New York Times Bestselling Author of Those Who Save Us
Review
Praise for Erika Robuck's Novels "Bring[s] the brooding author and the idealistic artist brilliantly to life."—Amy Belding Brown, author of Flight of the Sparrow, on THE HOUSE OF HAWTHORNE
“This gem of a novel spins a different, touching story.…You will love it, as I absolutely did.”—Tatiana de Rosnay, New York Times Bestselling Author of Sarahs Key, on CALL ME ZELDA
Review
“Erika Robuck resurrects the shadowy figure of Sophia Hawthorne, wife of the novelist, Nathaniel, and their intense love and commitment to each other during a life of creative inspiration, sacrifice, and loss.”—C.W. Gortner, author of
Mademoiselle Chanel
"Robuck's sure storytelling brings accomplished artist Sophia Peabody into the light and into your heart. Luminous, vivid, enchanting."—Lynn Cullen, bestselling author of Mrs. Poe
"Bring[s] the brooding author and the idealistic artist brilliantly to life."—Amy Belding Brown, author of Flight of the Sparrow
Synopsis
Against the unforgettable backdrop of New York near the turn of the twentieth century, from the Gilded Age world of formal balls and opera to the immigrant poverty of the Lower East Side, bestselling author Susan Vreeland again breathes life into a work of art in this extraordinary novel, which brings a woman once lost in the shadows into vivid color.
It’s 1893, and at the Chicago World’s Fair, Louis Comfort Tiffany makes his debut with a luminous exhibition of innovative stained-glass windows, which he hopes will honor his family business and earn him a place on the international artistic stage. But behind the scenes in his New York studio is the freethinking Clara Driscoll, head of his women’s division. Publicly unrecognized by Tiffany, Clara conceives of and designs nearly all of the iconic leaded-glass lamps for which he is long remembered.
Clara struggles with her desire for artistic recognition and the seemingly insurmountable challenges that she faces as a professional woman, which ultimately force her to protest against the company she has worked so hard to cultivate. She also yearns for love and companionship, and is devoted in different ways to five men, including Tiffany, who enforces to a strict policy: he does not hire married women, and any who do marry while under his employ must resign immediately. Eventually, like many women, Clara must decide what makes her happiest—the professional world of her hands or the personal world of her heart.
From the Hardcover edition.
Synopsis
NATIONAL BESTSELLERIt’s 1893, and at the Chicago World’s Fair, Louis Comfort Tiffany makes his debut with a luminous exhibition of innovative stained-glass windows that he hopes will earn him a place on the international artistic stage. But behind the scenes in his New York studio is the freethinking Clara Driscoll, head of his women’s division, who conceives of and designs nearly all of the iconic leaded-glass lamps for which Tiffany will long be remembered. Never publicly acknowledged, Clara struggles with her desire for artistic recognition and the seemingly insurmountable challenges that she faces as a professional woman. She also yearns for love and companionship, and is devoted in different ways to five men, including Tiffany, who enforces a strict policy: He does not employ married women. Ultimately, Clara must decide what makes her happiest—the professional world of her hands or the personal world of her heart.
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Synopsis
From Erika Robuck, bestselling author of Hemingways Girl
, comes a brilliant new novel about a literary couple. The unlikely marriage between Nathaniel Hawthorne, the celebrated novelist, and Sophia Peabody, the invalid artist, was a true union of passion and intellect.
Beset by crippling headaches from a young age and endowed with a talent for drawing, Sophia is discouraged by her well-known New England family from pursuing a womans traditional roles. But from their first meeting, Nathaniel and Sophia begin an intense romantic relationship that despite many setbacks leads to their marriage. Together, they will cross continents, raise children, and experience all the beauty and tragedy of an exceptional partnership. Sophias vivid journals and her masterful paintings kindle a fire in Nathaniel, inspiring his writing. But their childrens needs and the death of loved ones steal Sophias energy and time for her art, fueling in her a perennial tug-of-war between fulfilling her domestic duties and pursuing her own desires.
Spanning the years from the 1830s to the Civil War, and moving from Massachusetts to England, Portugal, and Italy, The House of Hawthorne explores the tension within a famous marriage of two soulful, strong-willed people, each devoted to the other but also driven by a powerful need to explore the far reaches of their creative impulses. It is the story of a forgotten woman in history, who inspired one of the greatest writers of American literature
About the Author
Erika Robuck is a contributor to the fiction blog Writer Unboxed, and she maintains her own blog, Muse. She is a member of the Hawthorne Society, the Hemingway Society, the Historical Novel Society, and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society. She lives in Annapolis, Maryland, with her husband and three sons. She is the author of Receive Me Falling, Hemingway's Girl, Call Me Zelda and Fallen Beauty.