Monticello - by Sally Cabot Gunning (Paperback)

About the Book

After the death of her beloved mother, Martha Jefferson spent five years abroad with her father, Thomas Jefferson, on his first diplomatic mission to France. Now, at seventeen, Jefferson's bright, handsome eldest daughter is returning to the lush hills of the family's beloved Virginia plantation, Monticello. While the large, beautiful estate is the same as she remembers, Martha has changed.

Book Synopsis

From the critically acclaimed author of The Widow's War comes a captivating work of literary historical fiction that explores the tenuous relationship between a brilliant and complex father and his devoted daughter--Thomas Jefferson and Martha Jefferson Randolph.

After the death of her beloved mother, Martha Jefferson spent five years abroad with her father, Thomas Jefferson, on his first diplomatic mission to France. Now, at seventeen, Jefferson's bright, handsome eldest daughter is returning to the lush hills of the family's beloved Virginia plantation, Monticello. While the large, beautiful estate is the same as she remembers, Martha has changed. The young girl that sailed to Europe is now a woman with a heart made heavy by a first love gone wrong.

The world around her has also become far more complicated than it once seemed. The doting father she idolized since childhood has begun to pull away. Moving back into political life, he has become distracted by the tumultuous fight for power and troubling new attachments. The home she adores depends on slavery, a practice Martha abhors. But Monticello is burdened by debt, and it cannot survive without the labor of her family's slaves. The exotic distant cousin she is drawn to has a taste for dangerous passions, dark desires that will eventually compromise her own.

As her life becomes constrained by the demands of marriage, motherhood, politics, scandal, and her family's increasing impoverishment, Martha yearns to find her way back to the gentle beauty and quiet happiness of the world she once knew at the top of her father's "little mountain."

From the Back Cover

After the early death of her mother, young Martha Jefferson accompanied her father, Thomas Jefferson, on his first diplomatic mission to Paris. Five years later, father and daughter have come home to Monticello, the family's beloved plantation in the Virginia countryside.

Though Monticello has suffered from her father's absence, Martha finds it essentially unchanged, even as she has been transformed. The sheltered girl who sailed to Europe is now a handsome seventeen-year-old woman with a battle-scarred heart who sees a world far more complicated than it once seemed.

Martha has long abhorred slavery and yearned for its swift end. Yet she now discovers that the home she adores is burdened by growing debt and cannot survive long without the labor of its slaves. As her father returns to government, he becomes increasingly distracted by tumultuous fights for power and troubling attachments. And as Martha begins to pay closer attention to Sally Hemings--the beautiful light-skinned slave long acknowledged to be her mother's half-sister--she realizes that the slave's position in the household has subtly changed. Eager for distraction, Martha welcomes the attentions of Thomas Randolph, her exotic distant cousin, but soon she uncovers burdens and desires in him that threaten to compromise her own.

Review Quotes

"Gunning . . . does an elegant job of re-creating history in a novel that portrays the passions and disappointments of the people making that history." -- Cape Cod Times