Local historian and author, Cornelia Brooke Gilder, will share the human element of Houses of the Berkshires here at the mansion. A tea will follow her presentation.

Through her years of research on country house life in Lenox, Cornelia Brooke Gilder has learned an array of poignant, heartbreaking, inspiring and dastardly human dramas of Gilded Age Lenox. Come hear about the bereft heiress, the disappearing diplomat and the murderous butler.

Gilder is co-author, with Richard S. Jackson, of The Houses of the Berkshires, the iconic architectural book first published by Acanthus Press in 2006 and 2011. Twenty years later this talk celebrates its republication. Books are available at the Ventfort Hall gift shop. In addition she authored Edith Wharton’s Lenox; co-authored with Julia Conklin Peters Hawthorne’s Lenox: The Tanglewood Circle, and with Joan Olshansky, A History of Ventfort Hall.