American Bloomsbury

A tight-knit group of writers live and work together, animated by sexual electricity. The beautiful teenage novelist falls for an older poet who’s in love with another woman. The pioneering feminist journalist dies in a freak accident with her Italian lover, leaving behind a string of broken hearts. We’re talking about the 1850s, when Emerson, Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in close quarters in the village of Concord, Massachusetts. Susan Cheever delves into the surprisingly un-Victorian personal lives of these literary stars in her new book, American Bloomsbury.