"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weaves together invention with actual historical documents in an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 andthose we
don't, stories of the everyday lives of ordinary people caught up
in an extraordinary time.
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