The New York love story of a beautiful heiress and a wealthy young architect, captured in a famous John Singer Sargent painting
In Love, Fiercely Jean Zimmerman re-creates the glittering world of Edith Minturn and Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes. Contemporaries of the Astors and Vanderbilts, they grew up together along the shores of bucolic Staten Island, linked by privilegeher grandparents built the worlds fastest clipper ship, his family owned most of Murray Hill. Theirs was a world filled with mansions, balls, summer homes, and extended European vacations.
Newton became a passionate preserver of New York history and published the finest collection of Manhattan maps and views in a six-volume series. Edith became the face of the age when Daniel Chester French sculpted her for Chicagos Columbian Exposition, a colossus intended to match the Statue of Libertys grandeur. Together Edith and Newton battled on behalf of New Yorks poor and powerless as reformers who never themselves wanted for anything. Through it all, they sustained a strong-rooted marriage.
From the splendid cottages of the Berkshires to the salons of 1890s Paris, Love, Fiercely is the real story of a world long relegated to fiction.
