Josephine

By Oliver Biddle

Read about
Volume II - That Biddle Boy
Volume III Gussie's Bombshell

Summary

Volume One

Josephine is the first volume in a three-generation family saga coinciding with the hundred-year life of a testamentary trust that was created for her benefit and that of her two younger sisters by their grandmother Louisa Bigelow in 1873. Josephine's youngest child Olive was the author's mother and he is her youngest child. 

The story of Josephine is told primarily in her own words from a cache of over four hundred letters systematically placed in a special file by the Bigelow trustee to whom she has had to surrender complete control over her finances on account of her reckless extravagance and in whom she confides the most intimate details of her personal life including episodes filled with pathos, drama, lurid scandal and human suffering.

Josephine's story tales on the added dimension of being told from letters in the same special file not only by herself but also by over a dozen other voices including the trustee and his counsel ("The Master Brain"), all five of her children, her two sisters and a cast of minor characters all of whom have their own story and version of the facts to contribute.

All of Josephine's children depend on her financially but she is utterly dependent on them emotionally for the filial love and affection she feel her due but finds strangely lacking and deeply disturbing. Astonishingly, it is the trustee to whom she turns for advice, sympathy and even active intervention in the lives of the various members of her family.

With the trustee located in Chicago and Josephine in residence either abroad or on opposite sides of the country, her letters to him become her lifeline and for a woman whose education ended with her first marriage at the age of seventeen, her command of the English language is nothing less than astonishing.

Josephine herself emerges as a very intelligent and highly complex personality with extreme mood swings and obsessive behavior including as perfect examples with their wildly entertaining exchanges and endless frustrations her tireless efforts to insure the future welfare of her two youngest children, Dorothy and Olive, who have been read out of the Bigelow will as future heirs as the result of a carefully guarded secret in Josephine's past, her struggle to recover from her second husband the prized furnishings she has left behind in her headlong flight from her second marriage, and her passionate desire to purchase a home she can no longer afford in which to end her days in peace and tranquility.

Volume One - "Josephine" Read a chapter in the Reading Room 
Volume Two - "That Biddle Boy"
Volume Three - "Gussie's Bombshell"
Readers' Comments

Author Bio

The author, Oliver Biddle, has lived for the past thirty-three years with his family in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia. He attended St. Bernard's elementary school in New York, Milton Academy and Harvard College. During World War II he served aboard two destroyers, USS Borie (DD 215) and USS Paul Hamilton (DD 590). After graduating from Columbia Law School as a member of its Law Review, he clerked for United States Circuit Court Judge William Hastie, served for two years in the Litigation Section of the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., and for several years after that, in the litigation department of Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York CIty, before joining the firm of Ballard Spahr, Andrews & Ingersoll in Philadelphia.

  Readers' Comments

Josephine:

"Clap, clap clap! Stomp, stomp, stomp! Honk! Honk! Flags waving; hats in the air! A masterpiece! Mind-boggling-the sheer depth and scope of intellectual effort involved! So interesting. And well written. And it's a riot!"

-Julia Legier

Josephine and That Biddle Boy From Philadelphia:

"I recently read the two-volume page-turner about Josephine and the Biddle Clan. What a bunch of characters! I much admire your skill and imagination in starting with a couple of boxes of correspondence and ending up with an insightful family saga. Also luck for us readers is the generous display of your sense of humor."

-Edmund Brunswick

That Biddle Boy From Philadelphia:

"Your book is gripping! Fascinating and dreadful! Your rendition of this history is lively and well organized. What a job of research! Your imagination in creating conversations and situations is amazing! The book is a real page-turner. The tale you of your parents is fascinating and tragic- it would make a great movie!"

–Flora Whitney Biddle, author of The Whitney Women

"Immediately I was immersed in a story of passion and capital, with the seductive addition of a gigantic fight over a will.  Wonderful stuff."

– Buck Scott

"My oh my, you really have a masterpiece there! When do I get back to a normal life?"

– Thelma Priest

Volume One - "Josephine" Read a chapter in the Reading Room 
Volume Two - "That Biddle Boy"
Volume Three - "Gussie's Bombshell"
Readers' Comments