Author to Talk at Lockwood-Mathews on Novel of Gilded Age Romance

A news release from the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum:

On Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2014, 11 a.m., at the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum, 295 West Ave., Norwalk, author Jean Zimmerman will give a talk titled, Love Fiercely: A Gilded Age Romance. A book signing courtesy of Elm Street Books in New Canaan will follow the lecture.

A famous John Singer Sargent portrait inspired Ms. Zimmerman to research its subjects and write their love story. Edith Minturn was a beautiful heiress and Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, a wealthy young architect.

Contemporaries of the Astors and the Vanderbilts, Stokes became a passionate preserver of New York history, Minturn the supermodel of their day, and together they battled on behalf of New York’s poor and powerless as reformers.

This lecture will explore the couple’s era and their world, one of fantastic wealth, when a Madison Avenue scion was moved to create model tenements and a beautiful heiress found herself cast in gold, floating above the modern landscape of America.

Jean Zimmerman is a New York-based writer who has made the history of Manhattan a central focus in her many books. She is the author of Love, Fiercely: A Gilded Age Romance (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012) as well as her historical novels Savage Girl (Viking, 2014) and The Orphanmaster (Viking, 2012), and many nonfiction books that include The Women of the House: How a Colonial She-Merchant Built a Mansion, a Fortune, and a Dynasty (Harcourt, 2006).

An honors graduate of Barnard College, Zimmerman earned a graduate degree in writing from Columbia University School of the Arts. She lives with her family in Westchester County, New York.

This will be the fourth in a series of lectures titled, Lockwood-Mathews Mansion: Seventy-Four Years of Culture — Art, Life, and Love, 1864-1938 by curators and experts in the field of Victorian era material life. The lectures are $25 for members, $30 for non-members per session.

Please RSVP by Friday, Sept. 5, 2014. The price includes lecture, lunch and a first floor Mansion tour. Lunch is courtesy of Michael Gilmartin’s Outdoor Cookers. The chair of the Lecture Committee is Mimi Findlay of New Canaan. Please contact info@lockwoodmathewsmansion.com or 203-838-9799, ext. 4 to purchase tickets.

The Museum’s 2014 cultural and educational programs are made possible in part by generous funding from LMMM’s Founding Patrons: The Estate of Mrs. Cynthia Clark Brown, the Museum’s Distinguished Benefactors: Klaff’s, The Xerox Foundation, and The Maurice Goodman Foundation; and LMMM Sustainers: Spinnaker Real Estate Partners.

The Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum is a National Historic Landmark. For more information on schedules and programs please visit: www.lockwoodmathewsmansion.com, e-mail info@lockwoodmathewsmansion.com, or call 203-838-9799.