Upon her marriage, Isabella Stewart was given an etiquette book entitled A Lady's Guide to Perfect Gentility. Belle dutifully took the book to Boston - and broke all the rules in a most delightful fashion.In this manner Belle Stewart of New York became Mrs. Jack Gardner of Boston and began a career that kept nineteenth-century Boston agog and made her a legend even in her lifetime. A Midwestern lady came East "to see Mrs. Jack Gardner and the Atlantic Ocean" - and was disappointed in neither. It was said that Mrs. Jack climbed out of a convenient window to elope with Jack, that she received her guests perched on the branches of a ceiling-high potted mimosa tree, that she kept lions in her Venetian palace basement.Louise Hall Tharp lifts the veil from the legend of Mrs. Jack and reveals the face of a sensitive, complex woman who was not only a daring fashion-setter, a great American show-off and a charmer, but a woman of genuine aesthetic sensibility in an era when "culture" was a social duty; a coquette easily flirted with, easily hurt; a woman warm and maternal but eventually to be childless.Though the society pages filled their columns with sly innuendo and misinformation about Mrs. Jack, and spitefully inclined Boston hostesses spurned her, her husband always stood solemnly beside her, she was always surrounded by an entourage of young proteges, and she enjoyed friendships with the leading men of her day - with Henry Adams and Henry James, John Singer Sargent and Whistler, Henry Lee Higginson and Charles Eliot Norton, F. Marion Crawford and the young Bernard Berenson. Read Less