“A searching, sensitive, and engagingly witty meditation.” —Lyndall Gordon   “What a great pleasure this gorgeous little book has given me! It should be offered everywhere indeed, and at every museum shop on earth.”—Honor Moore   A fascinating meditation on art and personality, Patricia Vigderman’s exploration of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s famous Boston museum radiates out from its subject to investigate Garnder’s legacy of luxury and willfulness.  Isabella Gardner’s high spirits and aesthetic pleasure, her women friends and female power, her friendships with the adventurers and aesthetes of her world, are gathered into this engrossing investigation of patronage and passion.  Blending biography, memoir, philosophy, and detective story, The Memory Palace is more than a tribute to the museum and the woman; it is an altogether new genre.  Vigderman’s witty and intimate quest for her subject sets a literary precedent for the appreciation of artistic imagination.  Loosening up the past, entering its mysteries and its memories, she reminds us that we change our lives when we begin a relationship with art.   Patricia Vigderman grew up in Washington, D.C., and Europe. She graduated from Vassar College, after which a circuitous course led her through editing, translating, freelance journalism, teaching, marriage, motherhood, divorce, a doctoral dissertation (on nineteenth-century novels as film, as history, and as autobiography), and a lot of time in museums. Her recent writing has appeared in The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, Northwest Review, Raritan, Seneca Review , and Southwest Review . She divides her year between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Gambier, Ohio, where she teaches in the English department at Kenyon College. She is married to the writer Lewis Hyde. Vigderman takes the reader on a museum tour unlike any other. Gardner--wealthy, cultured, and flamboyant--built Fenway Court in Boston in 1902, a lavish mansion and museum showcasing her impressive art collection, a yin-yang of West and East. Gardner stipulated that after her death, every object and artwork remain precisely as she left it, an edict Vigderman finds provocative. In a quest to understand Gardner and her aesthetics, Vigderman explores Gardner's "memory palace," considers her acquisitions, and profiles the women in her circle, especially Clover Adams, Henry's intelligent, irreverent, and ultimately suicidal wife; Mary Berenson, art advisor Bernard's indispensable better half; and Mary McNeil Scott, married to Asian expert Ernest Fenollosa and a cultural force in her own right. The result is a fresh and graceful narrative of discovery along the lines of Patricia Hampl's superb Blue Arabesque (2006). Seemingly insouciant yet thrillingly incisive, Vigderman is a dream docent, offering gossip, detection, and arresting and unexpected insights into art's place in our lives, and the struggles of prevote women to liberate themselves. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Vigderman grew up in Washington, D.C. and Europe. She graduated from Vassar, after which a circuitous course led her through editing, translating, journalism, teaching, a doctoral dissertation (on nineteenth-century novels as film, as history, and as autobiography), and a lot of time in museums. She divides her year between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Gambier, Ohio, where she teaches. Used Book in Good Condition