Mosby, Katherine 1957–

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Mosby, Katherine 1957–

PERSONAL: Born 1957.

ADDRESSES: Home—NY. Agent—Goldberg McDuffie Communications, Inc., 444 Madison Ave., Ste. 3300, New York, NY 10022.

CAREER: New York University, former adjunct professor.

AWARDS, HONORS: Book-of-the-Month Club award for fiction, for Private Altars; Notable Book of the Year, New York Times, 2002, for The Season of Lillian Dawes.

WRITINGS:

Private Altars (novel), Random House (New York, NY), 1995.

The Book of Uncommon Prayer (poems), HarperSan-Francisco (San Francisco, CA), 1996.

The Season of Lillian Dawes (novel), HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2002.

Twilight, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: Katherine Mosby is a novelist as well as a poet. In The Book of Uncommon Prayer, a collection of poem prayers, Mosby draws on the mystery and beauty of nature. A Library Journal reviewer felt that the works "evoke the power and mystery of divine love."

Mosby's debut novel, Private Altars, is a Southern gothic, the protagonist of which is a Yankee blueblood. Sophisticated and educated Vienna moves to 1920s Winsville, West Virginia, home of her husband, Willard Daniels, who has inherited the largest home in town. But the two are from different worlds, and Vienna's alcoholic and philandering husband leaves before their second child is born. Vienna alienates herself from most of the townspeople through her sophisticated poetry. Her few friends include black servants and her two suitors, the alcoholic town doctor and John Aimes, a reclusive neighboring farmer, whose son, Addison, becomes close to Vienna's daughter, Willa. Elliott, Vienna's younger child, is a budding naturalist who tends to sick and injured animals. A love of nature is rendered through the actions of Elliott and through the words of Grayson Saunders, a British botanist who visits the failing farm.

"In sentence after lush sentence, Mosby is intent on showing the reader that she was primarily a poet before trying fiction," wrote Ginia Bellafante in a review of Private Altars for Time. Claire Messud similarly noted in the New Yorker that "this is not a traditionally structured narrative; rather, it is a progression of incident and effect, drawing strength not from the relentless engine of plot but from the author's close observation and vividly realized scenes."

The Season of Lillian Dawes, set in the 1950s, is narrated by seventeen-year-old Gabriel Gibbs, an orphan who is expelled from boarding school and moves into his older brother Spencer's modest Manhattan apartment. The brothers are a contrast to the snobbery and self-indulgence of most of the other characters in the story, and Spencer gave up his job with the State Department to become a writer. Gabriel is fascinated by the lovely and mysterious Lillian Dawes from the first time he sees her on the arm of Spencer's former Yale roommate, Clayton Prather. He manages an invitation for Spencer and himself to spend a weekend at the Prather estate, where Spencer and Lillian meet and fall in love.

Nancy Pate wrote for the Detroit Free Press Online that The Season of Lillian Dawes is "a pleasure to read, thanks to the perceptive grace of the writing and the way Mosby renders Gabriel's inevitable confrontation with the ambiguities of adulthood with convincing tenderness." Allen also called Gabriel "one of the pleasures" of the book but found fault with the "character of Lillian, who, like her predecessor Vienna Whitcomb of Private Altars, is endowed with an impossible array of gifts …. Lillian is merely a stock figure. Allen commented on the attributes of the novel, noting that "the period color, the depiction of a long-vanished New York, is exquisite…. Mosby recreates such scenes lovingly and with a meticulous attention to language that betrays her origins as a poet. So too does her well-developed gift for the quick, vivid image." In the New York Times Book Review, Brooke Allen wrote that Mosby is "one writer who has managed to infuse real poignancy into the stylized, self-indulgent lives of the American upper crust," while Library Journal contributor Beth E. Andersen commented that the author's "New York City will appeal to fans of mannered novels—The Great Gatsby comes to mind."

Lavinia Gibbs, the protagonist of Twilight, is a woman in her thirties who breaks off her engagement with a man she knows cannot satisfy her and who, with a small income from her wealthy New York family, escapes to Paris, France, in 1930. She finds passion with Gaston Lesseur, a banker who admires Lavinia but who will never leave his wife for her. They continue their relationship as World War II looms, and it is with the Nazi takeover of Paris that Lavinia's life changes and the story is brought to a conclusion.

Lavinia, unlike Mosby's previous heroines, is not a raving beauty, and her mother describes her life as the mistress of a married man as a "perpetual twilight." A Kirkus Reviews contributor called Twilight "very low-key, but patient readers will savor the finely wrought prose and unexpectedly moving portrait of a woman who loses her privileges and finds herself."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, December 15, 1994, Donna Seaman, review of Private Altars, p. 735.

Choice, May, 1995, N. Tischler, review of Private Altars, p. 1450.

Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2005, review of Twilight, p. 253.

Library Journal, December, 1994, Mary Ellen Elsbernd, review of Private Altars, p. 133; January, 1996, review of The Book of Uncommon Prayer, p. 105; April 1, 2002, Beth E. Andersen, review of The Season of Lillian Dawes, p. 141; March 1, 2005, Andersen, review of Twilight, p. 79.

New Yorker, April 17, 1995, Claire Messud, review of Private Altars, pp. 106-107.

New York Times Book Review, June 9, 2002, Brooke Allen, review of The Season of Lillian Dawes, p. 8.

People, March 27, 1995, Louisa Ermelino, review of Private Altars, p. 37.

Publishers Weekly, November 14, 1994, review of Private Altars, p. 54; January 14, 2002, review of The Season of Lillian Dawes, p. 36; March 14, 2005, review of Twilight, p. 42.

Time, February 27, 1995, Ginia Bellafante, review of Private Altars, p. 74.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), July 13, 2003, review of The Season of Lillian Dawes, p. 6.