The Conversions of Edward Gibbon

“A nuanced reexamination … This balanced approach deepens rather than simplifies Gibbon’s legacy.” –Bill Kelly, Booklist

“The study of history, Edward Gibbon loftily insisted, requires rigorous and dispassionate scholarship in the service of fact; generations of historians have dutifully followed in his stead. Martha Saxton’s coolly composed and iconoclastic book probes just those areas where Gibbon’s prized detachment failed him. A subversive and clear-eyed portrait of an icon of the Enlightenment.” –Deborah Baker, author of Charlottesville: An American Story

“In her final book, Martha Saxton has drawn a fresh, incisive portrait of the monumentally influential historian Edward Gibbon. Making expert use of previous biographies and histories, private letters, original documents, and her own wide-ranging knowledge, she vividly illuminates Gibbon’s stunning public achievements and fraught personal life. As physically unattractive as his mind was radiantly brilliant, Gibbon had intense struggles with his father, some of his colleagues, and above all with women. Saxton’s acute gaze takes it all in, giving us the man in full.” –Jean Strouse, author of Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers

” ‘In love, ’ Virginia Woolf once said about the intrepid historian Edward Gibbon, ‘he was ineffective.’ Martha Saxton distills this in The Conversions of Edward Gibbon, vividly showing how the changes across Gibbon’s life were spectacular scenes of failure to love rightly. Frank, sensitive, and delicate, this book feels like an intimate rapport between a flawed man and his judicious biographer. It is a powerful work of spiritual autobiography, a fierce late-life coda that, without antipathy or anti-hagiography polemics, does not yield to what Saxton rightly calls ‘canons of respectability.’ “ –Ishion Hutchinson, author of Fugitive Tilts

Martha Saxton (1945-2023) was a historian and biographer. She wrote Being Good: Women’s Moral Values in Early America and biographies of Mary Washington, Louisa May Alcott, and Jayne Mansfield. Saxton received a PhD from Columbia University before joining the faculty at Amherst College, where she taught history and women’s studies for twenty years.

Judith Thurman is the author of Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller and Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, among other books. A staff writer at The New Yorker, she lives in New York City.

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