What drew Nathaniel Hawthorne to a remote village deep in the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts in 1850? Slip into the fascinating social scene he encountered in the drawing rooms and on the croquet lawns of Lenox’s country retreats. Here, under the benevolent spell of the Sedgwick family, the separate worlds of high-minded Bostonians and high-powered New Yorkers were stitched together by conversation, recreation and even marriage. Nurturing the lively exchange of ideas on everything from art to abolition, Lenox’s cottages played host to a community that enlightened a nation. Luminaries such as Caroline Sturgis Tappan and Oliver Wendell Holmes resume their vibrant lives through the rare photographs and engaging sketches of everyday life in Hawthorne’s Lenox: The Tanglewood Circle, which also includes a delightful retrospective visit from Henry James and Edith Wharton.
A lifelong Berkshire resident, Cornelia Brooke Gilder was educated at Vassar College and Cambridge University. She was cocurator of “A Walk in the Country: Inness and the Berkshires” at the Clark Art Institute in 2005. Her most recent work, Houses of the Berkshires: 1870–1930, coauthored with Richard S. Jackson Jr. (Acanthus Press, 2006), was named an honor book by Historic New England.
Born in 1914, Julia Conklin Peters worked for over forty years in the Lenox Library. During the fifteen years of research on Hawthorne’s Lenox: The Tanglewood Circle, the encyclopedic Mrs. Peters was undeterred by blindness or old age. She died in March 2007.
