GRANDMA DEAREST

I was stunned that your reviewer found it necessary to question the key emotional narrative of my book “The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter” (March 10), which tells the complex story of a woman of fierce talent who was thwarted, with devastating consequences, by conflicts between art and female obligation in old family Boston. I would have thought that by now, after decades of work by social, feminist and art historians to expose and analyze these forces, such a story would be understood--even by literary men.

HONOR MOORE, KENT, CONN.