Mount Auburn Cemetery

Chasing Beauty: A Conversation with Natalie Dykstra and Curator Meg Winslow
2026-10-06 18:30 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
Join author, Natalie Dykstra, and Curator, Meg Winslow, to learn about the life and legacy of Isabella Stewart Gardner

Mount Auburn Cemetery will host a conversation between Natalie Dykstra, author of Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Meg Winslow, Senior Curator of Historical Collections & Archives at Mount Auburn Cemetery this October.
A presentation on the research and writing process of Chasing Beauty will be followed by a conversation on collaboration with Mount Auburn and what makes a biography come alive.
About Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Natalie Dykstra
The vivid and masterful story of Isabella Stewart Gardner—creator of one of America’s most stunning museums—an American original whose own life was remade by art. Includes archival photos of Isabella’s world, museum, and the art she collected.
An extraordinary achievement of storytelling and scholarship, Chasing Beauty illuminates the fascinating ways the museum and its holdings can be seen as a kind of memoir, dazzling and haunting, created with objects instead of words and displayed per Isabella’s wishes in the exact placements she initially curated.
From award-winning author Natalie Dykstra, Chasing Beauty is the story of the complex and singular woman behind one of the most fascinating museums in the nation and the world—a tale of beauty and loss, grit and American self-invention.
About Natalie Dykstra
Natalie Dykstra is the author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life, which won a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship and was a finalist for the 2013 Massachusetts Book Award. Her recent book Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner has received a New England Society of New York Book Award and the Marfield Prize, the national award for arts writing. Her work has been supported by a Public Scholars grant from the NEH and an inaugural Robert and Ina Caro Research Fellowship from the Biographers International Organization. She has been an honorary fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society since 2011. She is an emerita professor of English at Hope College and a current scholar-in-residence at Brandeis University. She lives with her husband near Boston.

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