The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter

by Honor Moore

Overview

“A striking portrait of a woman artist’s struggle for life.” —Arthur Miller

Margarett Sargent was an icon of avant-garde art in the 1920s. In an evocative weave of biography and memoir, her granddaughter unearths for the first time the life of a spirited and gifted woman committed at all costs to self-expression.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393344370
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/02/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Honor Moore is the author of two previous memoirs in A Daughter’s Family Trilogy—The Bishop’s Daughter, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The White Blackbird, a New York Times Notable Book—as well as a play and three collections of poems. She lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

A chronicle of a high-born, spirited woman's fight for creative expression and her own sanity at the dawn of modern art. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"It is a virtue of this autobiographical biography that it succeeds in evoking the unfathomable nature of a personality."

New York Review of Books

"Engrossing, beautifully written . . . but also touching in its candor about the flawed character of a beloved relation."

Boston Globe

"Ambitious and searching . . . as rich in casually telling detail as only an authentic family album could be."

The Nation

"Haunting and . . . complex . . . part biography, part memoir, of the woman who happened to be [Honor Moore’s] grandmother."

New York Times Book Review

Stockard Channing’s eccentric, canny, and wholly absorbing performance is perfect for this quite riveting biography. The poet Honor Moore follows her bestselling life of her father, Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore, with a study of her grandmother, Margarett Sargent, a gifted painter, Boston Brahmin, and society “it” girl. Margarett is compellingly interesting in the way of Zelda Fitzgerald, except that her worldly and artistic gifts were all her own, not acquired by marriage. Her achievements, flamboyant glamour, social position, mental instability, and bisexuality make for a potent brew. Channing’s tone and accent are perfect, and she is wonderfully in control here, hitting all the right notes in a piece that is as much about class, period, and place as about Margarett’s singular and ultimately shattering story. B.G. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2020 - AudioFile