Divine Affection
“Art is a tyrant. It demands heart, brain, soul, body…I wed art.”
–Rosa Bonheur
Château de Rosa Bonheur (opened 2017)
Thomery, France
As she lay dying, Queen Victoria whispered for Turi, her Pomeranian, to be brought to her bed. Another nineteenth century woman who worshipped animals was a French painter. To view her canvasses, to learn about a road less travelled, proceed to the Château Musée Rosa Bonheur.
Much Will be Required (1867)
“I got my start by giving myself a start.” –Madame C. J. Walker
In William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29,” the speaker bemoans, “I all alone beweep my outcast state.” In contrast, rather than indulge in a pity party, Sarah Walker turned her misfortune into a fortune, and in the process, she became America’s first female, self-made millionaire.
Mr. Darcy
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
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.
Dance All Night (1928)
Thinking Makes It So
“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.
There's No Place
“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.
The Shackle of Shanghai
“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.
The Beautiful and the Damned (1922)
Heidi: Bid Time Return
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.
I Did Invent It (1914)
Sita's curse (1886)
“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.
Order in the Court
Round Midnight (1913)
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.
It Tolls For Thee
Black and White Gold
(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.
Any Thing But
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.
The Bumblebee (1916?)
Beautiful
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.