Mrs Smith Reads Love, Fiercely: A Gilded-Age Romance by Jean Zimmerman, #CBR4 Review #16
Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes, 1897
John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925)
Oil on canvas
When telling the story of Edith Minturn Stokes and her equally elegant husband I. N. Phelps Stokes, it’s hard to know where to start. They were honestly a real-life Edith Wharton couple, born heirs of New York’s 400, growing up in gilded-age extravagance, wanting for nothing, yet instilled with Progressive values that would be the beacon of their lives to the end of their days together.
Love, Fiercely tells the story of entwined childhoods, marriage and missions and reads like a drawing room romance, full, in equal measures of grace, pleasure, art, passion and intelligence. As a couple, Edith and Newton are both the colloquial archetype of the 1% of an earlier age, and yet singularly representative of the best that age had to offer.
