Friday, May 04, 2007

Self-Promotion: Rob's Latest Publication

The current issue of the New England Review (28.1 2007) includes my essay "The Passion of Rose Elizabeth Cleveland," about the life and literary career of President Grover Cleveland's youngest sister. In the late 1970s, a researcher in the Minnesota Historical Society discovered a box of passionate love letters between Rose Cleveland and Evangeline Whipple, the wife of Minnesota's first Episcopal bishop. Rose and Evangeline were outed in The Advocate and in Lillian Faderman's groundbreaking Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in the Twentieth Century. It made a sensational story: the bishop's wife exchanging passionate love letters with the former First Lady of the United States (a position Rose held before her brother married in his second year in the White House). But there was much more to the story which hasn't been told until now. Rose was an intellectual and a writer, and her published writing says interesting things about gender, fashion, and the place of women in late 19th-century American society.

Classicists may also be interested in a new translation of Book 6 of Vergil's Aeneid by Ian Ganassi, which also appears in the current NER.

To order your copy of the New England Review, click here. Individual copies are $8, and the website offers secure ordering. You can also check out my two previous contributions to the NER, on Sinclair Lewis (25.3 2004) and Theodore Roosevelt (26.4 2005; available online by clicking the link).

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