Event Calendar - Date List

Read and Feed

Date: Every third Thursday - RSVP's are not required
Time: 6:30 P.M.
Cost:    Free
Leader:  Marion Glass
Location: Ted's Montana Grill, 4300 Wilson Blvd, Arlington VA, 703-741-0661

Upcoming book is

The Book:  The Autobiography of Mrs. Thom Thumb : A Woman in Full, by Melanie Benjamin (historical fiction, 448 pgs, paperback)
Discussion Lead:  Chip


When she was born in 1841, no one expected that Mercy Lavinia Warren Bump would mature into a world famous young woman who would never reach three feet in height – nor that her younger sister was destined to be even smaller than Vinnie. But, as much as the Bump sisters resembled each other physically, they could not have been any more temperamentally different. Vinnie demanded to go to school with her everyone else; her sister was content to stay home with her mother. Vinnie dreamed of seeing the world; her sister could barely imagine a world other than the one she knew within the confines of the Bump family farm. Told in her own words, The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb, is a chronology of the life of one of the bravest young women of her day. Lavinia Warren, as she came to be known under P.T. Barnum’s guidance, fought the odds associated with her size and with her gender to become one of the biggest celebrities of the century. Hers was a life of the highest triumph and the lowest personal grief imaginable, but what a life it was. When Lavinia’s married Charles Stratton, their wedding has been called the the nineteenth century’s equivalent of Diana’s marriage to Prince Charles. It certainly made the pair wealthy, even by modern standards.