What Is Visible

Starred review from March 10, 2014
Laura Bridgman lost all her senses but that of touch due to a fever at age two. Though she was an internationally renowned figure in the mid-19th century, Laura has been all but forgotten by history. Fortunately, Elkins revives this historical figure with a wonderfully imaginative and scrupulously researched debut novel. Arriving at the Perkins Institution as a child, Laura learns to read, write, and “speak” through signing via the manual alphabet, with letters tapped out on her hand. Though she receives hundreds of visitors at “Exhibition Days,” Laura has few friends or family members who care about her. She is intensely attached to Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe from the institution, and suffers virtual abandonment when he marries to begin a family of his own. Howe, acting in accordance with the religious and scientific mores of his time, thwarts the dreams and desires of the women around him, including his wife, Julia Ward; Laura’s teacher, Sarah Wight; and Laura herself. But despite the many physiological and social restrictions placed on her, Laura comes across as a willful, mysterious marvel, showing “how little one can possess of what we think it means to be human while still possessing full humanity.”

May 1, 2014
The story of Helen Keller's forgotten forerunner comes nimbly to life in Elkins' debut novel.Born in 1829, Laura Bridgman was just 2 years old when she contracted scarlet fever. She survived but lost all senses except touch. At 7, she was sent to Boston to live with Samuel Gridley Howe, founder of the Perkins Institute, who taught her tactile sign language, tapped out in the palm of the hand, which eventually enabled her to read, write and do arithmetic as well as hold conversations. As word of Howe's achievement spread, Laura herself grew famous. A miracle girl whose renown was rivaled only by Queen Victoria, she was celebrated in the press and even written about by Dickens. Yet she remained an experiment for Howe. After he acquired a family and her development plateaued, she was increasingly left trapped in her own inner world. Flitting back and forth over the course of a half-century, the novel is told from alternating viewpoints, including Laura's own. She is at once savvy and naive, and as she strives to understand the world through touch alone, she falls in love with Howe, campaigns to be allowed glass eyes and access to the Bible, and has an intensely physical affair with an orphaned Irish girl. A little too much is made of the latter event, along with bouts of anorexia and self-harming, though the historical background is elegantly sketched. In her late 50s, Laura meets 8-year-old Helen Keller, already known as "the second Laura Bridgman." ("The second, and I'm still here!" she huffs.) Other perspectives contextualize her celebrity and include those of Howe; his headstrong wife, Julia, a writer, abolitionist and suffragist; and Laura's favorite teacher, who marries a missionary and meets a tragic end. An affecting portrait which finally provides its idiosyncratic heroine with a worthy voice.

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May 15, 2014

Having lost every sense save touch to scarlet fever as a toddler, Laura Bridgman (1829-1889) captivated her contemporaries' imaginations by learning to communicate through finger spelling and writing, inspiring dolls, poetry, and even an essay by Charles Dickens, decades before Helen Keller was born. For all the fervor and news stories Laura generated at the time, though, there is no autobiography to tell us of her inner life, and few remember her story; debut novelist Elkins creates a fictional memoir to remedy those erasures. The audacious liberties Elkins takes--inventing a romance for Laura, taking great pains to highlight the most tragically ironic hypocrisies of her famous caregivers--make the story sometimes feel like a writer's exercise rather than a novel. However, Elkins does inspire the reader to imagine life experienced only through touch, and Laura's powerlessness to make her own decisions feels criminal rather than justifiable, even given her disabilities. VERDICT Fans of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time will surely enjoy this novel for its peek inside another unconventional mind. Patrons interested in protagonists with disabilities, historical women's fiction, or LGBT romance will appreciate Elkins's original approach to each. [See Prepub Alert, 1/6/14.]--Nicole R. Steeves, Chicago P.L.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2014
In this fictional treatment of the life of Laura Bridgman, the first deaf and blind person to learn language, Elkins aims to show how little one can possess of what we think it means to be human while still possessing full humanity. After a raging bout of scarlet fever at the age of two, Laura loses her eyes, her hearing, and her ability to taste and smell. Taken from her family home by Dr. Samuel Howe and taught to communicate via hand spelling, Laura soon becomes a celebrated figure attracting hundreds to exhibitions at Howe's Perkins Institution, including Charles Dickens and Dorothea Dix. But Howe has his own agenda, using Laura to push both the causes of phrenology and anti-Calvinism. When Laura embraces the Baptist faith, she loses Howe's favor but never loses her fire. Told in alternating chapters by Laura, Howe, his poet wife, and Laura's beloved teacher, this is a complex, multilayered portrait of a woman who longed to communicate and to love and be loved. Elkins fully captures her difficult nature and her relentless pursuit of connection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)