Linked Data Explorer
Passion by the brook
- "From the Dust Jacket: 1840--revolt was in the air. Boston seethed with discontent. The words of Emerson and Parker struck at the heart of sterile social and religious traditions. Harvard scholars were turning to Utopian socialism; clergymen were becoming Transcendentalists and radical reformers; egalitarians, abolitionists, medicine men, and quacks all had their panaceas for the ills of the world. Out of this maelstrom was born a noble experiment in communal living-Brook Farm. George Ripley left his Boston pulpit, and with his wife, Sophia, and a few freedom-loving, free-thinking friends set out to establish an economic and spiritual haven in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. This "New Jerusalem" of high minds and hard work was designed to liberate the passions. It was to be a working model of an ideal community. But it contained within itself the germs of its own destruction. A paradox of festive pagan freedom and ingrown Puritanism that shunned the passions it meant to free, the Farm was unable to accept all the implications of love. Young couples left the Farm to marry, Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne turned their backs on the pioneers of ideal society. And, ironically labeled the haven of adultery, Brook Farm became the laughingstock and shame of Boston society. Into this highly charged atmosphere cam Lili Gray, a young woman who best understood the meaning of love and liberty. Convent-bred, luxuriant, and lively, Lili was in complete contrast to the severe, ascetic Protestants. As Sophia Ripley turned slowly away from the Farm, Lili ripened into one of its most devoted members. Her deep love for a young printer through which she tried to cast off the chains of marriage of convenience is one of the highlights of the book. With a rare sense of living historical fact and a Rabelaisian humor, Truman Nelson tells the fascinating and moving story of this tragicomic Utopia. This superb novel vibrates with fascinatingly real, though historic, characters. He has written with great perception, historical fidelity, and extraordinary zest of a significant phase of the American Renaissance . of a community whose development is an exciting story in itself. The Passion By The Brook stands not only as a brilliant re-creation of a heroic era, but as a moving and extremely important novel."
- "Passion by the brook"@en
- "The passion by the brook. A novel about Brook Farm"