Beyond the Miracle Worker: The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller - Hardcover

Nielsen, Kim E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807050466 ISBN 13: 9780807050460

Publisher: Beacon Press, 2009

Synopsis

After many years, historian and Helen Keller expert Kim Nielsen realized that she, along with other historians and biographers, had failed Anne Sullivan Macy. While Macy is remembered primarily as Helen Keller's teacher and mythologized as a straightforward educational superhero, the real story of this brilliant, complex, and misunderstood woman, who described herself as a "badly constructed human being," has never been completely told.

Beyond the Miracle Worker, the first biography of Macy in nearly fifty years, complicates the typical Helen-Annie "feel good" narrative in surprising ways. By telling the life from Macy's perspective-not Keller's-the biography is the first to put Macy squarely at the center of the story. It presents a new and fascinating tale about a wounded but determined woman and her quest for a successful, meaningful life.

Born in 1866 to poverty-stricken Irish immigrants, the parentless and deserted Macy suffered part of her childhood in the Massachusetts State Almshouse at Tewksbury. Seeking escape, in love with literature, and profoundly stubborn, she successfully fought to gain an education at the Perkins School for the Blind.

As an adult, Macy taught Keller, helping the girl realize her immense potential, and Macy's intimate friendship with Keller remained powerful throughout their lives. Yet as Macy floundered with her own blindness, ill health, and depression, as well as a tumultuous and triangulated marriage, she came to lean on her former student, emotionally, physically, and economically.

Based on privately held primary source material, including materials at both the American Foundation for the Blind and the Perkins School for the Blind, Beyond the Miracle Worker is revelatory and absorbing, unraveling one of the best known-and least understood-friendships of the twentieth century.

About this title

About the Author

Kim E. Nielsen is an award-winning educator, the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities We the People stipend, a Fulbright lecturer, the author of many journal articles, and frequent public speaker. Her books include Helen Keller: Selected Writings (2005), The Radical Lives of Helen Keller(2004) and Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism and the First Red Scare (2001). She also served as an advisory editor to the forthcomingEncyclopedia of American Disability History (2009). She lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin where she is Professor of History & Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

Reviews

After writing two books about Helen Keller, historian Nielsen (The Radical Lives of Helen Keller) vowed she would never again write anything even remotely related to her. Fortunately, she couldn't help herself: upon reviewing the letters of Keller's teacher, Anne Sullivan Macy, Nielsen became convinced [we] had shortchanged the woman known only as the teacher of Helen Keller. Through Sullivan's correspondence and notes, Nielsen remedies this lack with a lightly fictionalized autobiography drawing on the written impressions of Keller and others. Nielsen devotedly chronicles Sullivan's emergence as an opinionated and intelligent if troubled woman who was born poor, afflicted early on with a debilitating eye disease and abandoned to an almshouse after her mother's death. Luck and innate ability plucked her out of the asylum and placed her in the classroom. But Nielsen concedes that Sullivan's relationship with Keller took center stage in both the public consciousness and private life. Citing historical uncertainty, Nielsen self-consciously skims over Sullivan's early teaching methods, including that iconic moment at the water pump—the very moment we all wonder about. 4 b&w photos. (May)
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Nearly a footnote to history, Anne Sullivan Macy achieved both fame and notoriety as Helen Keller’s devoted teacher—the so-called miracle worker who took an obstreperous, willful deaf and blind child and transformed her into a gifted communicator. Given her inauspicious start in life as an orphaned resident of a fetid almshouse straight out of Dickens, Macy improbably succeeded, only to have her groundbreaking achievements eclipsed by her student’s charisma. Always a headstrong personality, Macy earned legions of detractors as a result of her firm handling of her prize pupil. Yet through it all, Keller and Macy forged a loving, lifelong bond that superseded all other familial and romantic attachments. Historian Nielsen focuses attention on Macy’s troubled beginnings, her own devastating eye ailments, and her prodigious ambition to create a considerate yet equitable biography of a complex woman whose singular contributions to the burgeoning field of education for the blind have often been misjudged. --Carol Haggas

Edition details

• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807050466
• ISBN 13: 9780807050460
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320