The Smith Club Book Club generally focuses on fiction and non-fiction books authored by or written about Smith women. Everyone is welcome, whether you’ve read the book or not. The conversations are always illuminating, convivial and wide-ranging.
The Smith Club Book Club meets at 2:00 pm on the last Sunday of every other month, with some exceptions. Starting in 2020, we’ve begun meeting virtually over Zoom. Contact smithclubco@gmail.com to get on the book club email list.
The next book club meeting will be on Sunday, October 2 at 2:00 pm. We’ll be discussing The Honeymoon by Dinitia Smith ’67. Dinitia will be joining us via Zoom for this conversation!
The last book club gathering of 2022 will be on December 4 at 2:00 pm. We’ll be discussing 48 Peaks, Hiking and Healing in the White Mountains by Cheryl Suchors ’72.
About The Honeymoon by Dinitia Smith ’67
Based on the life of George Eliot, famed author of Middlemarch, this captivating account of Eliot’s passions and tribulations explores the nature of love in its many guises.
Dinitia Smith’s spellbinding novel recounts George Eliot’s honeymoon in Venice in June 1880 following her marriage to a handsome young man twenty years her junior. When she agreed to marry John Walter Cross, Eliot was recovering from the death of George Henry Lewes, her beloved companion of twenty-six years. Eliot was bereft: left at the age of sixty to contemplate profound questions about her physical decline, her fading appeal, and the prospect of loneliness.
In her youth, Mary Ann Evans—who would later be known as George Eliot—was a country girl, considered too plain to marry, so she educated herself in order to secure a livelihood. In an era when female novelists were objects of wonder, she became the most famous writer of her day—with a male nom de plume. The Honeymoon explores different kinds of love, and of the possibilities of redemption and happiness even in an imperfect union. Smith integrates historical truth with her own rich rendition of Eliot’s inner voice, crafting a page-turner that is as intelligent as it is gripping.
Let us know if you’re interested in joining the Smith Club Book Club.
2022 Smith Club Book Club Dates and Selections
- January 30 – The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki ‘80
- March 27 – Ms. Adventure: My Wild Explorations in Science, Lava, and Life by Jess Phoenix ‘05
- May 22 – Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman
- July 31 – Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
- October 2 – The Honeymoon by Dinitia Smith ’67
- December 4 – 48 Peaks, Hiking and Healing in the White Mountains by Cheryl Suchors ’72
2021 Smith Club Book Club Selections
- Untamed by Glennon Doyle
- America’s First Daughter by Stephanie Dray ’93 & Laura Kamoie
- The Body is Not An Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor
- The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free by Paulina Bren
- Band of Sisters by Lauren Willig
- Kindred by Octavia Butler
2020 Smith Club Book Club Selections
- Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West by Dorothy Wickenden
- The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern ’00
- Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
- American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson
- Friends and Strangers by J. Courtney Sullivan ’03
- Julia Child: The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Julia Child ’34, Introduction by Helen Rosner ’04
2019 Smith Club Book Club Selections
- The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer
- Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster by Stephen Carter
- Kickdown: A Novel by Rebecca Clarren ’97
- The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote by Elaine F. Weiss
- Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
- Becoming by Michelle Obama
2018 Smith Club Book Club Selections
- Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
- The Velveteen Daughter by Laurel Davis Huber ’73
- Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction by Mary Ellen Hannibal ’81
- We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
- The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway
- My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsburg
2017 Smith Club Book Club Selections
- A Spoonful of Sugar by Amanda Orr ’90
- Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love by Simran Sethi ’92
- My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem ’56
- Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper ’96
- Terrible Virtue by Ellen Feldman (Bryn Mawr College ’64, MA ’67).
- The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez
2016 Smith Club Book Club Selections
- Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman ’92
- The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern ’00
- Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family by Amy Ellis Nutt ’77
- The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara ’95
- Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis by Alice Kaplan