Doris Grumbach – författare

The Missing Person is a daring work that tells the story of Franny Fuller, the sexy, voluptuous movie star whose glorious blonde mane and whispery voice have aroused the fascination of every gossip columnist and moviegoer in the country. But beneath her radiant, compelling image lives still the frightened little girl from upstate New York. Define only by the way the studios, the flacks, her husbands and lovers, and the public perceive her, Franny Fuller is a “missing person,” no more tangible than the image projected of her on a thousand silver screens. Framing her portrait of Franny Fuller within a persuasive and moving story, Doris Grumbach has created a haunting work that probes the private misery behind public glamour.

The Ladies is a touching, imaginative retelling of the story of two of history’s most interesting characters: Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, well-born Irish women who defied all conventions of their eighteenth-century Irish homeland and eloped to the small hamlet of Llangollen in Wales, where they lived as a married couple. There, removed from the eyes of the world, they hoped to live out their quiet lives. But the world outside gradually came to claim the Ladies—first out of curiosity, but eventually on the basis of profound respect, and even love. Visited by such luminaries as Edmund Burke, William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, and Horace Walpole, among many others, Eleanor and Sarah became known throughout Britain and to history as the “Ladies of Llangollen.”

It records an eventful and quotidian year crowded with literary pleasures and pains, the natural beauties and social particulars of life in coastal Maine, the mingled joys and affronts of travel to New York, Washington, Mexico, and the looming presence of illness and mortality. It is, finally, a book about the successful search for home and for inward peace.