Author Talks: Author Talk: Natalie Dykstra on Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner

Join us as we welcome award-winning author Natalie Dykstra for this in-person discussion of her most recent book, Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner. 

In Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner (Mariner Books; on sale March 26), award-winning author Natalie Dykstra delivers the definitive biographical portrait of the ambitious and innovative woman behind one of America’s most important art collections. With access to all archival holdings at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—including thousands of digitized and newly accessible letters and other unpublished records—as well as original sources in Paris, Venice, and more, Dykstra brings Isabella to life as never before. An incredible achievement of storytelling and scholarship, Chasing Beauty illuminates the fascinating ways the museum and its holdings can be seen as a kind of living memoir—as the place where Isabella “put herself on display . . . her taste, her passions, her sorrow, her nerve, her capacious curiosity, her relationships.” A tribute to the transformative power of art and the indomitable spirit of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Chasing Beauty stands as an inspiring tale of beauty and loss, resilience and self-invention, and the enduring legacy of a visionary creator.

About the author: Natalie Dykstra is the author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life. Her work on IsabellaStewart Gardner has won a Public Scholars Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities and an inaugural Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship sponsored by the Biographers International Organization (BIO). Dykstra, emerita professor of English at Hope College in Michigan, lives with her husband in Waltham, MA.