@Judalinewrote:
@LoriLoriwrote:
@Judalinewrote:
@LoriLori Beautiful painting. Do you still have the copy?
@Judaline, no. I gave it to a good friend who loved it. She passed away unexpectedly last year and her brother told me her mom took it, and I'm so glad she did....BTW in the MFA they have the original vases on either side of the painting.
@LoriLori It kind of gave me chills when I read none of the girls ever married and two had emotional disturbances. I don't know why.
@Judaline, almost done and now I can answer it. None of the girls kept journals or if they did, the journals are private or didn't survive but some of their relatives, especially their uncle, kept copious journals.
First off, the answer to your question is it was quite common in Boston in the late 1800s for very wealthy sisters to not marry. According to the author it was unique to Boston society. Even Cabot sisters didn't marry. The author lists addresses of the homes on Beacon Hill near the Boit family's and their "cottage" (mansions) in Brookline which had sisters living there and there were quite a few Three here, two there, four there, tons of them. All super rich. They didn't need to marry for money and it left them free to pursue whatever they wanted and travel back and forth to Europe, which the Boit girls (except Jeannie) did a lot.
Now for more than you asked:
Their mother died at 48 and they seemed to do better after she was gone so that lines up with Henry James's quote that the daughters were a drag on her social life. In fact their father married a friend of Florie, his oldest daughter (she was 18 or 20 or something) and they approved, they liked her very much, but she died in childbirth giving birth to her second.
Florie, the oldest, had a nice life. She was an artist accepted to the Boston Arts & Crafts Guild and worked in leather and silver. She was also a lesbian who in Boston lived with her cousin, her lifetime love, who went to MIT and was a professor at Simmons. The cousin did not travel with the sisters when they went to Paris and Italy. The family was supportive of the match.
Here's the most interesting thing about Florie, who is in the shadows in the painting representing how women become more mysterious and secretive as they age (look at Julia, the youngest, and look at the other two girls's legs and Florie in profile in shadow) --
-- Florie Boit introduced golf to the United States. She loved golfing abroad. At first she sank flowerpots in the ground to demonstrate it at the country club to get people excited about it.
Back in Europe she devoted herself tirelessly to volunteering in several ways in World War I and it seems to have exhausted her and taken a toll on her mental state.
Florie Boit was diagnosed with "hysteria" in her early 50s which seems to again be connected to female problems, possibly menopause. It was in this part that I learned that "hysteria" and "hysterectomy" share a root. So hysteria was exclusively a woman's diagnosis.
Jane known as Jeannie (third oldest, on the right in the painting next to the oldest sister, Florie) had emotional disturbances somehow connected to female problems described in her uncle's journal as "womb problems." She was in and out of institutions but out a lot and lived out her life in Paris in her own apartment with devoted servants, sometimes visiting their villa in Tuscany. She was a gifted pianist and played all the time, it was said to be the only time she was calm, when she was playing.
Mary Louise by all accounts was fine. She played piano and harp and she and Florie (while she could) and Julia traveled frequently between Boston, Paris, their estate in Newport their enormous villa in Italy. They were mentioned in the society pages as being at the opening of Tanglewood.
Little cutie Julia displayed with her legs open holding her doll grew up and played instruments as well and was a gifted illustrator. One of her watercolors is reproduced in the book, it's quite good, of three women playing golf. Most of her stuff is still in the family but some is in museums. She lived to 91.
I love the painting more than ever and am so glad I read this fascinating book.
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