Author Natalie Naylor Presents Women in Long Island’s Past: A History of Eminent Ladies and Everyday Lives a Canio’s Books
05:00 pm
Canio's Books, Sag Harbor,
Friday, November 23 at 5 p.m. Author Natalie Naylor presents Women in Long Island’s Past: A History of Eminent Ladies and Everyday Lives
Women have been part of Long Island’s past for thousands of years but are nearly invisible in the records and history books. From pioneering doctors to dazzling aviatrixes, these larger-than-life but little-known heroines are brought out of the lost pages of island history thanks to author Natalie A. Naylor. Anna Symmes Harrison, Julia Gardiner Tyler, Edith Kermit Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt all served as first lady of the United States, and all had Long Island roots. Beloved children’s author Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote The Secret Garden here, and hundreds of local suffragists fought for their right to vote in the early twentieth century. Mrs. Russell Sage, benefactress of Sag Harbor is also included in this important work.
In 1976, Prof. Naylor joined Hofstra’s New College, where she taught courses in American social history, including Long Island history and women’s history. Professor Naylor also was director of Hofstra’s Long Island Studies Institute from its founding in 1985 until she retired in 2000. She organized many conferences on Long Island history for the institute and edited or co-edited several of the institute’s publications, including Long Island Women: Activists and Innovators (1998), Nassau County: From Rural Hinterland to Suburban Metropolis (2000) and Journeys on Old Long Island: Travelers’ Accounts, Contemporary Descriptions, and Residents’ Reminiscences, 1744-1893 (2002). She has also published many articles on Long Island history.
Saturday, November 24 at 5 p.m. Historian and biographer Anka Muhlstein presents her new book Monsieur Proust’s Library. Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a character without a book in hand. Everybody in his work reads: servants and masters, children and parents, artists and physicians. The more sophisticated characters find it natural to speak in quotations. Proust made literary taste a means of defining personalities and gave literature an actual role to play in his novels. In this entertaining and informative book, Anka Muhlstein, draws out these themes in Proust’s work and life, thus providing not only an introduction to the momentous In Search of Lost Time, but also highlights of some of the finest work in French literature.
Anka Muhlstein was born in Paris. She has published biographies of Queen Victoria, James de Rothschild, Cavelier de La Salle, and Astolphe de Custine, a study on Catherine de Médicis, Marie de Médicis, and Anne of Austria, and a double biography, Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart. Her most recent work is Balzac’s Omelette: A Delicious Tour of French Food and Culture with Honore’de Balzac. Anka Muhlstein has won two prizes from the Académie Française and the Goncourt Prize for Biography. She and her husband, Louis Begley, have written a book on Venice, Venice for Lovers.
