Inspiration Behind the Book

Like Mary Louisa Boit, I was born the third daughter in a family of four girls. And like Victoria, the fifteen-year-old heroine of my novel, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, the first time I saw John Singer Sargent’s famous painting of the four Boit sisters at the MFA in Boston in 2001, I was spellbound.

It’s such a strange portrait: so large— the figures almost life sized— and so dark.  I remembered having heard about it on a segment of the PBS art history series, Sister Wendy’s American Collection, so I was prepared to be amazed. The thing that had struck me most about the quaint little nun’s description of the painting was that two of the girls, the two hiding in the shadows at the back of the painted room, had suffered from mental illness.   

As I stood there staring at the giant canvas, I thought I’d like to walk into that room and find out what’s going on with these Boit girls, the way Lucy from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe walked through the back of the wardrobe into Narnia. For weeks after my trip to Boston, I couldn’t get the painting out of my head. I started reading about Sargent and the Boits and before long told my writer’s group I had a new idea for a book.   

The research for the book was frustrating since, though there was plenty of information about Sargent, I couldn’t find much about the Boits. It wasn’t until Dr. Erica E. Hirshler’s book, Sargent’s Daughters: the Biography of a Painting, was published that all the pieces fell into place. 

I now had access to the kind of in-depth background material about the Boit sisters that helped me paint a realistic portrait of their lives.  Though most of the characters are purely fictional, I tried to make all the details about John Singer Sargent and the Boits as accurate as possible. I confess that there were times when the facts of their lives dovetailed so remarkably with my fictional plot devices, that it gave me chills.  

I have the deepest respect for John Singer Sargent’s art and have spent a good deal of time tracking down his remarkable paintings in my travels around the globe. I hope he would be satisfied by how he’s portrayed in my book.

- Sara Loyster