Georgiana Bruce Kirby New York: Putnam's, 1887. Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature.

Georgiana Kirby was an Englishwoman who, as soon as she heard about Brook Farm, recognized that here was "the spiritual hospitality I had so longed for." Her years at "the community" form the central episode in her autobiography. Like Codman, she remembers her life there in utopian terms. In particular, she eulogizes it as "a grand place for children," especially because it was free from "false [class] distinctions: "with us, farmers', artists', sea-captains', and cooks' children found themselves on the same plane of opportunities." The road she traveled to get to Brook Farm she calls "the bridge which led me to the new era." Writing in the Gilded Age, she believes more than ever in the example of Brook Farm, in "the present necessity for a reorganization of society on a just basis." Given the way America has grown more unequal and unjust, however, she fears the only road to such a future now leads through violent revolution.

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