Fri. Bookshelf Traveling for Insane Times #6

The top shelf of my favorite bedroom bookcase is home to three very large first-edition biographies, none of which I have really read from cover to cover. They are beautiful, pristine copies, and as I took them down and browsed through them, I realized I hope I will read one in the next few months, from cover to cover. But it will be a difficult choice.

Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man by Dale Peterson, published in 2006, is the one I'm most likely to tackle first, and at 685 pages (very small type),  it will be a job to "tackle." But because I've always been drawn to her work over many decades, and because she has led such an extraordinary life, I think I will submit to it. (A 4.19 rating on Goodreads.)

 
Goodall turned 86 years this year (born April 3, 1934), so this book was published when she was a very young 72 years and still accomplishing a great deal. Goodall and Dale Peterson collaborated on a number of books previous to this one, so he is very much familiar with her life's work and who she is as a person.  I remember I bought it because it was so highly acclaimed when it was published.

The other biography I've been meaning to read for so very long is The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism by Megan Marshall (2005). Once again, I purchased this hardcover immediately after publication because it was so highly and universally regarded, and also because the Peabody Sisters lived in Massachusetts, growing up in Salem. They were friends and colleagues of their contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The most interesting thing about them was that in the 1830s and onward, they were the opposite of the ideal American woman, in that they were very highly educated, extraordinarily intellectual, did not keep their opinions to themselves, and inspired the men in their circle by igniting philosophical debates. They were very much a part of the Transcendentalist Movement. The  youngest sister Sophia married the author Nathaniel Hawthorne. The middle sister Mary married and inspired the most noteworthy American educational reformer of the 19th century, Horace Mann. And the oldest sister Elizabeth was fire-and-ice involved in all the philosophical discourse of the day. Her name is linked with many more reformers than I can list here. An extraordinary family of sisters, who are often referred to as "the American Brontës."  (A 4.12 rating on Goodreads.)

The third biography is another blockbuster. And a chunkster, at 830 pages, with another nearly 200 pages in notes.  It is Juliet Barker's The Brontës, published in 1994 in the UK and in 1995 in the US.

 I have the first American edition and have used it as a reference book many, many times, though I have not read it cover to cover. It, too, has been the most highly acclaimed work about The Brontë Family to date. But for a time it went out of print, which I have NEVER understood. Then it was revised and republished as The Brontës: The New Edition in the UK and in the US as The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors. For more information, please follow the link. (Another 4.19 rating on GoodReads.)