Fire And Roses Sparknotes

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Fire and Roses was written by Nancy Lusignan Schultz in 2002. It depicts the burning of an Ursuline Convent in Charleston, Massachusetts by a mob of citizens, including the factors leading up to it’s destruction, and it’s fallout. While it describes a plethora of characters involved in the riot, it focuses on Bishop Fenwick and the Mother Superior of the Covenant, Mary Ann Moffatt. The book begins with describing the arduous efforts of Bishop Fenwick to open the Ursuline Convent in the decidedly anti-Catholic area of 19th century Massachusetts. It then elaborates on the everyday goings on in the Convent and women’s academy that the Sisters run, while also revealing various conflicts and frictions that would later lead to the riot and destruction of the Covenant. These factors include religious disagreement, gender issues, territorial conflict, the escape of Sisters Rebecca Reed and Elizabeth Harrison, and class division(among a few others). The events of the burning on August 11th and 12th and it’s consequences are the topic of the second half of the book. …show more content…

It straddles the line between academic, fact based writing, and historical fiction. Some of the most entertaining parts of the book come when the book shifts to a more typical narrative based writing, such as when it introduces the reader to the riot in the first few pages. This is especially true of the first half of the book, where Schultz frequently goes on painfully detailed tangents, such as her description of Mary Ann Moffat’s Fathers long winded squabbles and conflicts over various pieces of land(Schultz, pg. 27). Overall, Fire and Roses is a fairly enjoyable work of Historical Literature that, while occasionally losing itself to details, paints an interesting and vivid picture of 19th century New

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