Attic of Dreams Receives Kirkus Review!
Neagley combines a personal memoir with the history of a well-known tourist site.
The author presents the reader with two fascinating stories that gradually come together. She begins with a personal account of growing up in a Russian immigrant family and coping with her parents’ alcoholism. She then recounts how, in the early 1960s, an era of more limited opportunities for women (“Expectations are to possibly get a job, usually in typically female areas of employment, get married, and have children. Very few mothers work outside the home”), she developed a professional career in interior design that brought her into contact with the Webb family of Vermont’s Shelburne Farms (and for a time, into a marriage to scion Alec Webb). The rest of the book is focused on the transformation of Shelburne Farms from a private estate to the tourist attraction it has become and on Neagley’s life as part of the Webb family. This admixture of personal history and chronicle of the Shelburne Farms estate is engaging to read throughout, though it works best when addressing the transformation of Shelburne Farms, detailing the search for models of transforming (and financing the transformation of) a private estate into a public resource and business. Among the comparable sites the stewards of Shelburne Farms consulted, including Colonial Williamsburg, one that curiously never seems to have come up is the Biltmore Estate, which has an even longer history of a being a productive working concern. Also, given the author’s international travel and professional education, the reader might ask why there was no consultation with the British National Trust considering their extensive experience with the preservation of stately homes for access to the public. Still, the book is a fascinating and worthwhile account of what happens when a family estate must reinvent itself.
A personal story effectively complements this historical account of Shelburne Farms.