Overview

In 1895, a specialist straps five-year-old Katharine Hathaway, then suffering from spinal tuberculosis, to a board with halters and pulleys in a failed attempt to prevent her from becoming a hunchback like the little locksmith who does odd jobs at her family's home. Forced to endure her confinement for ten years, Katharine remains immobile until age fifteen, only to find that none of it has prevented her from developing a deformity of her own. The Little Locksmith charts Katharine's struggle to transcend physical limitations and embrace her life, her body, and herself. Her spirit and courage prevail as she expands her world far beyond the boundaries prescribed by her family and society: she attends Radcliffe College, forms deep friendships, begins to write, and in 1921 purchases a house of her own that she fashions into a space for guests, lovers, and artists. Revealing and inspirational, The Little Locksmith stands as a testimony to Katharine's aspirations and desires--for independence, love, and the pursuit of her art.

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A powerful revelation of spiritual truth. -- Boston Globe Katharine Butler Hathaway...was the kind of heroine whose deeds are rarely chronicled...[She took] a life which fate had cast in the mold of a frightful tragedy and redesign[ed] it into a quiet, modest work of art. -- New Yorker This remarkably un-self-pitying book remains poignant and truthful. Hathaway's descriptions of the writing process are beautiful and on the mark. [She] treats the actual events in her life as practically irrelevant: the story she emphasizes is her spiritual and creative struggle to claim 'selfish' time to write, her intense loneliness, her startlingly frank observations about her sexuality, and her rebellion against the belief that an imperfect person does not experience desire. -- Publishers Weekly You must not miss it...[The Little Locksmith] is the kind of book that cannot come into being without great living and great suffering and a rare spirit behind it. -- New York Times

Author Information

Katherine Butler Hathaway was born in 1890 in Massachusetts, and was afflicted with tuberculosis of the spine from an early age. She spent her childhood confined to her bedroom, and was left both stunted and hunchbacked. However, her imagination was never confined, and later in her life she purchased her own sanctuary where she could live alone and become the autonomous artist she had always dreamed of. Julia Atwood is an actor and audiobook narrator who earned her bachelor's degree in classics and psychology from Wheaton College. She went on to attend the Moscow Art Theater's Stanislavsky Summer School and graduated from Brown University with her master's degree in acting. She is currently based in New York City. Alix Kates Shulman is the award-winning author of over a dozen books of fiction, memoir, biography, essays, and books for children. A lifelong political activist, Alix attended the 1963 March for Equality in Washington, DC, where Martin Luther King, Jr., declared his dream, and joined New York City's first women's liberation group in 1967. She received a Clara Lemlich Award for a lifetime of social activism in 2018.

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