by Kitty Burns Florey, author
In this lecture, author Kitty Burns talks about Amity Street, the sequel to her 2012 novel The Writing Master, which took place in New Haven in 1856. Amity Street moves ahead 35 years: it is now 1892. Anna Felice, a wealthy former opera star, travels from Rome, Italy, to America — to Manhattan, to New Haven, finally to Amherst, Massachusetts — in search of the truth about her birth. The novel is deeply immersed in the history — the architecture, the shops, the colleges, the farms, the customs — of the town of Amherst not long before the turn of the century, and the end of an era.