I just finished reading Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Natalie Dykstra. Here’s the short version—wow!

Here’s the slightly longer version: Beautiful prose.  Rich with insights.  Wonderful storytelling. Not necessarily in that order

I did not go into Chasing Beauty cold. Natalie and I became deadline buddies and fast friends in the months in which she finished Chasing Beauty and I finished The Dragon From Chicago. For many months, perhaps as much as a year, we spoke one or twice a week about our trials and our triumphs. We touched base via text and email more often than that.[1] I got to hear her thoughts on the craft of writing in general and aspects of Gardner’s life in particular. Moreover, I interviewed her twice for the Women’s History Month series here in the Margins, in 2021 and 2024. Those conversations gave me enormous respect for Natalie’s intelligence and wisdom,[2] as a writer and otherwise. But nothing could have prepared me just how good Chasing Beauty is.

The obvious approach would have been to simply write the story of the woman who created the Gardner museum. And Dykstra tells that story. But the museum is the crescendo to which she builds. In some ways, the book could just as readily be titled The Education of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Before Gardner could build the museum that now bears her name, she had to build what I think of as the museum in her head. With Dykstra as our guide, we watch Gardner work her way through grief and friendship. We travel with Gardner, both as she visits the larger world[3] and on her personal intellectual and aesthetic journeys through books and art, and music and art, and, philosophy (or perhaps more accurately, ideas) and art, and, well, art. We share what Dykstra describes as “Isabella’s on-going romance with objects” and her “greediness for experience.” We are swept along in the wake of a woman who was larger than life, and yet Dykstra also gives us moments in which to pause and enjoy a telling detail.

Over and over as I read I was stopped by sentences that were beautiful in its clarity, images that delighted me, or a telling piece of context that opened up Gardner’s story in time and space.

All the thumbs up!

[1] Did we grumble and bemoan our fates? Yes we did. Did we reminded each other how lucky we were to have these opportunities? Yes we did, though not as often as we grumbled.

[2] Not the same thing. in my opinion.

[3] Her time in Egypt and Japan caught my imagination in particular.