Synopses & Reviews
“Tis a small canvas, this Boston,” muses Stewart Jameson, a Scottish portrait painter who, having fled his debtors in Edinburgh, has washed up on Americas 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 Bostons most prominent family. “I must make this Jameson see my artists touch, but not my womans 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 everyones 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, cant see that Fanny is a woman; Fanny, consumed with her own masquerade, cant tell that Jameson is falling in love with her. The citys Sons of Liberty cant 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friends and accomplished historians Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore, Blindspot weaves together invention with actual historical documents in an affectionate send-up of the best of eighteenth-century fiction, from epistolary novels like Richardsons Clarissa to Sternes picaresque Tristram Shandy.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 dont, stories of the everyday lives of ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary time.
Synopsis
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.
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.