Helen in Love: A Novel [Paperback]

The astonishing and imaginative debut novel about Helen Keller and the man she loved

What comes to mind when you think of Helen Keller? Is it the deaf-mute wild child at the water pump outside her Tuscumbia, Alabama, home portrayed in The Miracle Worker or the adult activist for the rights of the disabled and women, the socialist who vehemently opposed war? Rosie Sultan’s debut novel imagines an intimate part of Keller’s life she rarely spoke or wrote about: her one and only love affair.

Peter Fagan, a reporter from Boston, steps in as her secretary when her companion Annie Sullivan falls ill. The world this opens up for her is not the stuff of grade school biographies. Their affair meets with stern disapproval from Annie and from Helen’s mother, and when the lovers plot to elope, Helen is trapped between their expectations and her innermost desires. Sultan’s courageous novel insists on Helen’s right to desire, to human frailty—to be fully and completely alive.Rosie Sultan is a former fellow at the Virginia Center for the Arts and has taught writing at Boston University, the University of Massachusetts, and Suffolk University. She lives outside Boston.Copyright © by 2012 by Rosie Sultan

They say that love is blind. But fame can blind a person, too. That night Peter led me across the grass outside the Chautauqua tent to where rows of metal tables behind the hotel were stacked high with food: country hams with salt, yeasty breads, the sharp, green scent of peas, even the iron scent of radish floated past as he sat me down under the cool of a trailing willow tree. I moved my fingers over the slim knife, rounded spoon, plate, and thick-rimmed tumbler atop a rough place mat. Immediately “seeing” them in my mind’s eye, I picked up chicken, beets, grilled l“4