DMA Arts & Letters Live will present an immersive evening about art collector and philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner with novelist Emily Franklin and biographer Natalie Dykstra.

Franklin’s novel The Lioness of Boston offers a deeply evocative account of the daring visionary who was determined to live life on her own terms and created an inimitable legacy in art collecting, transforming the city of Boston.

Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by acclaimed biographer Natalie Dykstra is an extraordinary achievement of storytelling and scholarship that uncovers the multilayered self-portrait encoded in the museum’s objects and rooms, at the same time delivering the story of a life every bit as dazzling and haunting. Dykstra’s work on Isabella Stewart Gardner has won a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award.

Together in conversation, Franklin and Dykstra will share their expansive knowledge of this extraordinary and complicated woman who first opened the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1901, providing public access to one of the finest private art collections in America and one of the first allowing the public to view a personally curated art collection by a woman.