The Lioness of Boston

Emily Franklin is the bestselling author of twenty-five books including The Lioness of Boston, historical fiction based on the life of trailblazer Isabella Stewart Gardner, a daring visionary who, in the 1800s, survived tragedy and created an legacy in American art and transformed the city of Boston. The novel is now in its eleventh printing and was recently featured as a clue on Jeopardy!. Her young adult books include The Half-Life of Planets (nominated for YALSA’s Best Book of the Year) and Tessa Masterson Will Go to Prom (named to the Rainbow List) and Last Night at the Circle Cinema (Junior library Guild selection/ALAN Pick). A former chef, she wrote the cookbook-memoir Too Many Cooks: Kitchen Adventures with 1 Mom, 4 Kids, and 102 New Recipes to chronicle a year of new foods, family meals, hilarity and heartache around the table. Her debut poetry collection, Tell Me How You Got Here, was published in 2021. Her work has been published in the New York Times, The Boston Globe, Kenyon Review, and Guernica among other places as well as long-listed for the London Sunday Times Short Story Award, featured on National Public Radio, and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries. Her novel, Love & Other Monsters, historical fiction set in 1816 and told from the perspective of Mary Shelley's important but forgotten stepsister Claire Clairmont, who forever changed the course of literature as part of the Frankenstein origin story, was published in April 2026 and was an instant Indie Press Bestseller. With searing relevance to our here and now—of celebrity worship, climate disaster, of complicated femininity, Love & Other Monsters is a feminist reckoning of sisters, survival, and the creation of monsters—both those on the page and those who walk among us.