Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family Book

In 1906, Suzannah Lessard's great-grandfather, the prominent architect, socialite, and hedonist Stanford White, was sensationally murdered by the husband of a showgirl White had seduced when she was 16. The acquittal of the killer on the grounds of insanity added to the scandalous gossip. In this beautifully written memoir, Lessard, a writer for the New Yorker, recalls growing up on the White family estate on Long Island, where the murder was a taboo subject. She evokes a sense of repressed and dark passion that infected the harmonious landscaping and architecture White had created. She writes of "coldness that may feel like warmth, or violence that presents as lust for life." In this extraordinarily literary nonfiction mystery, Lessard slowly reveals that her family history held more secrets than the murder, and reaches a startling and controversial climax.Read More

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  • Product Description

    In this extraordinary story the author digs and digs until she finds the whole story. Along the way she discovers that not only was her great-grandfather murdered by the husband of Evelyn Nesbitt, a showgirl at the time, who was enraged with jealously, only to be acquitted on the grounds of insanity, but that the repercussions of this event and of her great-grandfather's behaviour on the rest of the family and its subsequent generations was devastating. Throughout the gripping narrative snippets of information about Stanford are woven into the incredible tale of the author's own upbringing and the whole family. By the end the story of the murder and its sordid circumstances are revealed. A beautifully written and extraordinary powerful book.

  • 0297819402
  • 9780297819400
  • Susannah Lessard
  • 10 March 1997
  • Weidenfeld & Nicolson
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 352
  • First UK Edition First Impression
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