Download Blindspot: By a Gentleman in Exile and a Lady in Disguise AudioBook Free
“Tis a little canvas, this Boston,” muses Stewart Jameson, a Scottish family portrait painter who, having fled his debtors in Edinburgh, has washed through to America’s significantly shores. Eager to start anew in this new world, he advertises for an apprentice, but the lad who comes knocking is not a lad whatsoever. Fanny Easton is a lady in disguise, a, fallen woman from Boston’s most dominant family. “I must make this Jameson see my designer’s touch, however, not my woman’s form,” Fanny creates, in a notice to her best friend. “I would turn my expertise into capital, and that capital into liberty.”
Liberty is what everyone’s seeking in boisterous, rebellious Boston on the eve of the American Revolution. But everyone is suffering from some sort of blind location, too. Jameson, distracted by his haunted history, can’t see that Fanny is a female; Fanny, consumed with her own masquerade, can’t notify that Jameson is dropping deeply in love with her. The city’s Sons of Liberty can’t quite see their way clear, either. “Ably do they see the shackles Parliament fastens about them,” Jameson writes, “but to the fetters they clasp after their own slaves, they may be strangely blind.”
Written with wit and exuberance by longtime friends and attained historians Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore, Blindspot weaves mutually invention with real historical documents in an affectionate send-up of the greatest of eighteenth-century fiction, from epistolary novels like Richardson’s Clarissa to Sterne’s picaresque Tristram Shandy. Prodigiously learned, superbly crafted, and lush with the bawdy, romping sensibility of the time, Blindspot celebrates the art work of the Enlightenment and the passion of the American Revolution by telling stories we realize and the ones we don’t, stories of the day-to-day lives of ordinary people swept up in an extraordinary time.
