Book Club’s next read is ‘Chasing Beauty’ by Natalie Dykstra

There are few places in Boston more captivating than the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, with its immersive art exhibits and expertly stunning floral displays.   

You may know about the art or the famous 1990 heist, but equally as fascinating is the woman the museum is named after: Isabella Stewart Gardner, the turn of the century art collector and philanthropist who turned her home into a public space for the finest paintings, tapestries, rare books, prints, porcelains, and furniture.

This April — Gardner’s birthday month — Boston.com’s Book Club is diving into the story of the woman behind one of the nation’s most impressive art collections with “Chasing Beauty” by Natalie Dykstra. In this new biography, Dykstra has painted a vivid portrait of the life and ambitions of one of the most famous Bostonians in history. 

“Natalie Dykstra has written an absorbing, deeply researched biography that is also a travelogue, Edwardian period drama, and art history primer, with a supporting cast that includes Henry James, John Singer Sargent, Edith Wharton, and Henry Adams. In these pages, Isabella Stewart Gardner comes to life as a feminist pathbreaker finally given her due—and an artist in her own right,” said Heather Clark, author of “Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath,” in praise of the book. 

Born in 1840 to a wealthy New York family, Isabella Stewart found her way to Boston by way of marriage to married Boston Brahmin Jack Gardner. The early years of her marriage and time in Boston were fraught with tension with Boston’s high society and the devastating loss of her only child. 

But Gardner found solace in art and globe-trotting that allowed her to amass one the nation’s most extensive collections of European, Asian, and American art. “Chasing Beauty” details how Gardner came to establish herself as a respected art connoisseur at a time when it was uncommon for women to be involved in art collection at all. 

Dykstra is just the writer and researcher to do justice to this story. She is an award-winning emerita professor of English and senior researcher at Hope College in Michigan, where she’s taught writing, literature, and the arts for twenty years. 

And this isn’t the first time she’s used to talents to uncover stories about women of the Gilded Age. Her work on “Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life,” a book about the life of one of Boston’s “most fascinating and mysterious” society women, won her a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and  grants from the Schlesinger Library and the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Her thoroughly researched account of Gardner’s life is sure to be a hit whether you’re a history buff or just a lover of good storytelling. “Chasing Beauty” reads not like a lecture, but as a page-turning narrative. 

“Copiously researched and engagingly written, ‘Chasing Beauty’ is biography at its best: a vivid, empathic portrait of an extraordinary woman,” said Caroline Weber, author of “Proust’s Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris.”

Joining Dykstra for our April Book Club discussion is Lauren Tiedemann, owner and manager of the Winchester bookstore Book Ends. The store opened in 1984 under its original owner Judy Manzo, who retired in 2022. Rather than see the beloved shop close, Tiedemann and her business partner Jillian Hartline stepped up to buy the store and continue its legacy. 

In the year since, Book Ends has expanded its offerings to include book clubs, a monthly wine tasting, adult book fairs and children’s events. After working in corporate bookstores for more than a decade, the bookseller felt inspired to own her own shop, particularly one that valued its surrounding community.

“I think it’s so important that communities have their own stores that reflect the community’s values, the community’s needs and are there to help them out and to be there to get them what they need,” Tiedemann told GBH. 

Join the conversation with Natalie Dykstra and Lauren Tiedemann as they discuss her new book “Chasing Beauty” on April 30 at 6 p.m. 

Buy “Chasing Beauty” from: Bookshop | Book Ends