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By a Gentleman in Exile and a Lady in Disguise
by Jane Kamensky & Jill Lepore
"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friends and accomplished historians Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore, Blindspot weaves together invention with actual historical documents in an affectionate send-up of the best of eighteenth-century fiction, from epistolary novels like Richardson’s Clarissa to Sterne’s picaresque Tristram Shandy.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.
"Starred Review. Readers not put off by the slow start will be rewarded by a beautifully crafted debut historical novel that is at once a tender love story, a murder mystery, and a brilliant sociological and political portrait of a turbulent time." - Library Journal.
".... 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.
"Bawdy and beguiling, suspenseful and tender, Blindspot is a continual seduction; this is historical fiction at its most erotic." – Rebecca Stott, author of Ghostwalk.
"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 Slammerkin.
This information about Blindspot was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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.
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