Research Catalog

Title

The imprisoned guest : Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the original deaf-blind girl / Elisabeth Gitter.

Author

Gitter, Elisabeth, 1945-

Publication

New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux : distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd., 2001.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

x, 341 p. : ill.; 24 cm.

Summary

In 1837, Samuel Gridley Howe, director of Boston's Perkins Institution for the Blind, heard about a bright, deaf-blind seven year old, the daughter of New Hampshire farmers. At once he resolved to rescue her from the darkness and silence of the tomb, and indeed, thanks to Howe and an extraordinary group of female teachers, Laura Bridgman learned to finger-spell, to read raised letters, and to write legibly and even eloquently. Philosophers, poets, educators, theologians, and early psychologists hailed Laura as a moral inspiration and a living laboratory for the most controversial ideas of the day. She quickly became a major tourist attraction, and many influential writers and reformers visited her or wrote about her. But as the Civil War loomed and her girlish appeal faded, the public began to lose interest. By the time Laura died in 1889, she had been wholly eclipsed by the prettier, more ingratiating Helen Keller. The Imprisoned Guest retrieves Laura Bridgman's forgotten life, placing it in the context of nineteenth-century American social, intellectual, and cultural history. Her troubling, tumultuous relationship with Howe, who rode Laura's achievements to his own fame, but could not cope with the intense, demanding adult she became, sheds light on the contradictory attitudes of a progressive era, in which we can find some precursors of our own.

Subject

• Bridgman, Laura Dewey, 1829-1889
• Bridgman, Laura Dewey
• Deafblind women > United States > Biography
• Howe, S. G
• Howe, S. G. 1801-1876
• Persons With Hearing Impairments
• Teachers of deafblind people > United States > Biography
• Teaching
• United States
• Visually Impaired Persons

Genre/Form

• Biographies.
• Biography

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [295]-326) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Laura -- Chevalier -- Institutions -- Mind -- Found -- Awakening -- Angel -- Second acts -- Sea changes -- Teachers and teaching -- Attachments -- Lamentations -- Legacies -- Revisions -- Epilogue: Passing.

ISBN

0374117381 (alk. paper)

LCCN

^^^00047642^

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library