Monticello: A Daughter and Her Father (Thorndike Press Large Print Historical Fiction) - Hardcover

Gunning, Sally Cabot

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1410494454 ISBN 13: 9781410494450

Publisher: Thorndike Press Large Print, 2016

Synopsis

When Thomas Jefferson's eldest daughter, Martha, returns to the family's Virginia plantation after five years abroad, heartbreak and political challenges are complicated by her father's absence.

About this title

From the Author

I can't tell you how excited I am about this novel.  When I discovered a letter Martha Jefferson wrote to her father when she was fourteen, "I wish with all my heart all the poor Negroes were freed . . . " I knew I had to read more about her.  I poured through her letters to her father and his to her and realized that she and I had embarked on a similar mission: to figure out her father. This now meant, of course, that my new mission was to figure out Martha. The relationships between father and daughter, between daughter and husband, between daughter and chldren, complicated by the reappearance of an old love who haunts her conscience kept me happily awake over many long nights. I hope you love reading this novel as much as I loved writing it.

From the Inside Flap

From the critically acclaimed author of The Widow's War comes a captivating work of literary historical fiction, set in America in the years after the Revolution, that explores the tenuous relationship between the brilliant and complex founding father Thomas Jefferson and his devoted daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph.
 
After the early death of her mother,young Martha Jefferson accompanied her father, Thomas Jefferson, on his first diplomatic mission to Paris. Five years later, father and daughter have come home to Monticello, the family's beloved plantation set high in the lush hills of the Virginia countryside.
Though Monticello has suffered from her father's absence, Martha finds it essentially unchanged, even as she has been transformed. The sheltered girl that sailed to Europe is now a handsome seventeen-year-old woman with a battle-scarred heart, who sees a world far more complicated than it once seemed.
Blessed with her father's sharp mind and independent spirit, Martha has long abhorred slavery and yearned for its swift end. Yet she now discovers that the home she adores is burdened by growing debt and cannot survive long without the labor of its slaves. Her bonds with those around her are shifting, too. As the doting father she has idolized since childhood returns to government, he becomes increasingly distracted by tumultuous fights for power and troubling attachments that pull him further away. And as Martha begins to pay closer attention to Sally Hemings--the beautiful light-skinned slave long acknowledged to be her mother's half-sister--she realizes that the slave's position in the household has subtly changed. Eager for distraction, Martha welcomes the attentions of Thomas Randolph, her exotic distant cousin, but soon Martha uncovers burdens and desires in him that threaten to compromise her own.
As her life becomes constrained by the demands of marriage, motherhood, politics,scandal, and her family's increasing impoverishment, Martha yearns to find her way back to her childhood home; to the gentle beauty and quiet happiness of the world she once knew at the top of her father's "little mountain."
An irresistible blend of emotional drama, historical detail, and vivid atmosphere,Monticello skillfully brings to life Martha Jefferson Randolph, a strong and compelling woman who influenced -- as much as she was influenced by -- one of the most intriguing figures in American history.

Edition details

• Publisher: Thorndike Press Large Print
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1410494454
• ISBN 13: 9781410494450
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 553