Marlene Wagman-Geller

Jane Austen’s House (opened in 1949)

  Chawton, United Kingdom

Jane Austen’s nephew observed of his aunt, “Of events her life was singularly barren, few changes and no great crisis ever broke the smooth current of its course.” Although Jane may have had a seemingly placid existence–she never left England–she nevertheless had her share of sunshine, of storm. 

                                                                                                     Semper Fidelis

Lois Wilson

“Hearts understand in ways our minds cannot.”—Lois Wilson

Stepping Stones (opened 1988)

62 Oak Road, Katonah, New York 10536

Visitors migrate to Katonah, New York, for its intriguing name or to scratch a historical itch as the region is dotted with sites ranging from pre-Revolutionary gristmills to Gilded Age mansions. Stepping Stones serves as a shrine to Lois Wilson, the First Lady of Sobriety.

Lois revealed that alcoholism is a cancer that also ravages the addict’s loved ones. The remarkable individual was born in 1891 in Brooklyn Heights, the eldest of six children of Dr. Clark and Matilda Burnham. The family were members of the Swedenborgian faith which counted amongst its followers Helen Keller and Robert Frost. The children attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, one of the first American schools to offer kindergarten (German for “Children’s garden”), followed by enrollment in the Quaker Friends School. The Burnhams spent summers in Manchester, Vermont, where the siblings played with Abraham Lincoln’s grandchildren. Robert Todd Lincoln had constructed Hildene, a twenty-four-room mansion, converted to a home museum. In her memoir, Lois Remembers, she described her childhood as “idyllic.”

While summering in Vermont, Lois met a friend of her younger brother, Rogers. Bill Wilson felt that the rich city girl viewed him with condescension. To impress Lois, who spent afternoons sailing on Lake Emerald, Bill outfitted his grandfather’s rickety rowboat with a bed-sheet sail. A gust of wind flung him overboard; caught in the sheet, he looked like a water-borne mummy. Lois rescued Bill—the beginning of a life-long pattern.

“Reject hatred without hating.”—Mary Baker Eddy

Mary Baker Eddy Historic House (opened 1931)

8 Broad Street, Lynn, Massachusetts

The most famous bath in history led the ancient Ancient Greek Archimedes to discern whether jewelers had added base metal to King Herod II’s gold crown. After his discovery, Archimedes ran naked through the streets of Syracuse crying, “Eureka! I found it!” Another aha! moment that originated from a watery discovery occurred when Mary Baker Eddy slipped on a patch of ice. An intriguing destination is the Mary Baker Eddy Historic House.

“I am constantly having to make an upheaval for some reason.”

–Sarah Winchester (in a letter to her sister-in-law

How the West was won–or lost– depending on one’s perspective, was determined by who wielded the Winchester Repeating Rifle. The heiress to the company’s fortune, Sarah Pardee Winchester, had a life bookmarked by guilt and guns.

“As for what other people think of me, I could worry about that every day, but choose not to.” –Wendi Deng Murdoch
 

 In 1972, the group Hall and Oates released their song that carried the refrain, “You can rely on the rich man’s money.” The lyric could have applied to Wendi Deng whose “old man” was billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Their relationship could have made copy in the Austrian aristocrat’s tabloid.

Literary orphans are associated with their respective locales: Jane Eyre with England, Dorothy with Kansas, Anne of Green Gables with Prince Edward Island. The paradigm holds true for Heidi and her Swiss homeland. The Johanna Spyri Museum affords visitors a glimpse into the author’s life while its environs provide a postcard of pastoral perfection.

“But we had the money, or rather it had us. We were held fast in its clutches.”

- Evalyn Walsh McLean in her memoir, Queen of Diamonds.

The mystery behind James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic centers on why Rose tossed “The Heart of the Ocean” into the waves above the sunken ship. A theory is Cameron based his celluloid jewel on “The Hope Diamond”: both were priceless blue gems, entangled with tragedy.  Evalyn Walsh McLean would have been a forgotten footnote of a fabulous fortune had her path not crossed that of the fabled diamond.

          While viewing the Palatial Chateau Ferrilres outside Paris, Wilhelm I commented, “Kings couldn’t afford this. It could only belong to a Rothschild!” The anecdote illustrates the wealth of the family whose coffers surpass that of royalty. In a move that shocked her milieu, one of the dynasty’s daughters turned her back on her rarified life seduced by a siren song.

(Being a great photojournalist is) “a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you.” –Lee Miller 

Farleys House & Gallery (opened 2006) 

East Sussex, England 

William Shakespeare in his play As You Like It wrote, “One man in his time plays many parts….” And one woman who played many parts was Lee Miller whose intrepid spirit lives on in her country retreat, a music box that recalls its chatelaine and the era of surrealism is a Sussex setting.   

Louisa May Alcott

“I would rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe.”—Louisa May Alcott

Some of America’s greatest authors, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau, slumber in Sleepy Hollow, a Concord cemetery. A notable grave belongs to the mother of young adult fiction, Louisa May Alcott. If, in Spoon River Anthology fashion, Louisa spoke from the afterlife, her story would involve her family, immortalized in her novel, Little Women.

Casa Guidi (opened 1995)

Florence, Italy

An immortal sonnet begins, “How do I love thee?/Let me count the ways.” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s grande amore was her husband, Robert, and their Florence home. To tread the halls of the literary couple, take a gondola ride to Casa Guidi.

Wrong for Women

Sarah Orne Jewett

“Love isn’t blind; it’s only love that sees.”—Sarah Orne Jewett

Sarah Orne Jewett House (opened 1931)

Sarah Orne Jewett observed, “We unconsciously catch the tone of every house in which we live.” The quotation rang true for the author, whose ancestral home formed the bedrock of her soul. To catch the author’s tone, travel to the Sarah Orne Jewett House.