Word: isabella
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Array of Problems. Perón himself had ordained Isabella's succession last fall when he chose her to run for Vice President and together they received 62% of the vote. There were doubts even then about her ability to lead the troubled country if he died in office. Many macho Argentines rejected the idea of a Presidenta. There was also dissatisfaction with her dance-hall background and limited education. "Personally, I am ashamed," said one retired general...
Toward the end, Perón sided more and more with the right. In a recent speech, he dismissed the young leftists as "jerks." Inevitably, the feuding factions will threaten Isabella's power...
Something in Boston's air is favorable to eccentrics, and Isabella Stewart Gardner was one of the all-time classics. She began her career in fairly tame fashion, doing all sorts of things that proper Bostonian ladies never did. She was born in New York--perhaps her worst offense. She wore diamonds in her hair. She had an affair with an incipiently bad novelist. She wore French dresses, she collected rubies. She let the painter John Singer Sargent chase her all over the gym at Groton, showed up at the Church of the Advent one Lenten Sunday to scrub...
...Gardner bought what she liked--that was her only criteria. Bernard Berenson (who would will his Florentine villa to Harvard) was her European buyer; he found that the best way to sell her anything was to claim it had been painted for, or had belonged to, an Isabella. She bought one of the world's 36 Vermeers because she found it "charming," and a portrait of Mary Tudor because the queen wears a pearl that once belonged to Isabella of Spain...
...culminating moral of the book, drawing superficially on the age-old metaphor of the stage of life, throws Prose's sensibilities for her characters into sharp relief. Looking through a window onto the world's future, Isabella agrees with the angels: human life is "just a series of stories and plays, most of which are exactly the same!" There is no reason to regret a bad life if it is "all just a story." Although reluctantly, Prose does allot Isabella a two-sentence demurral to finish the book: she wonders how the Glorious Ones' yearnings for earthly fame fit into...