The right to be forgotten - author discusses gilded-age book

By Sarah Daponde Asst. Arts & Features Editor Maura Jane Farrelly held a discussion about her recently published book, “Compliments of Hamilton and Sargent: A Story of Mystery and Tragedy on the Gilded Age Frontier,” on Sept. 30. The event was hosted in the Alumni Room and over Zoom. Yumi Park Huntington, program coordinator, said this was the first event in the Arts and Ideas series to be hosted this academic year. It was organized with the help of Mirari Elcoro, professor of Psychology, and Joseph Adelman and Sarah Adelman, professors of History. Senior History major Isabelle Atherton introduced Farelly, a Brandeis University associate professor and chair of American Studies. Atherton said Farrelly’s book “focuses on the Gilded Age and looks at prehistoric elites to show the 19th century change in an individual’s ability to hide from society.” Farrelly’s book is the 2025 winner of the Spur Award in the Best Western Historical Nonfiction section, she added. Joseph Adelman said he and Farrelly would be discussing the book in a “live podcast interview” format. The book features three characters, and two main locations - the East Coast and Wyoming, Joseph Adelman said. “One of the things I enjoyed most about the book is just how rich and complex the story becomes as you develop it,” he added. Farrelly said her idea for this book began when she found a photograph in her grandmother’s house in 2012. “Edith Sargent” was written on the back. She said she eventually found a letter to the editor of the New York Times written by Edith Sargent in 1913, which she wrote to say she was offended by the way the paper had written about her husband’s death. Her husband, John Dudley Sargent, became another one of Farrelly’s main characters. Robert Ray Hamilton, the great-grandson of Alexander Hamilton, was her third main character. “Everyone loved to read about the scandalous Hamiltons,” Farrelly said. The book follows the lives of these prominent individuals as their reputations were tarnished, according to Farrelly. In 1630, it was easy to disappear into the “uncivilized” West and build a new reputation, said Farrelly. By 1890, after the railroad was built and a transcontinental telegraph was established, it became “impossible to move away from their mistakes.” Farrelly said despite Edith Sargent being on the front of her book, she was the hardest character to research. “The story began with this woman. … And she ended up being - of the three main characters - the one that I had the fewest sources for,” she added. Edith Sargent was involved in many scandalous events and “had tons of newspaper coverage about her antics,” Farrelly said. A love affair involved Edith Sargent and a man from France. Farrelly said this man - Enrico Pranzini - was later “convicted of killing three women, and guillotined, and then his corpse was skinned, and turned into wallets in a scandal that led to the resignation of the President of the Third Republic of France. “The press really had a field day with her over this,” she added. Joseph Adelman asked about the importance of newspapers during the Gilded Age. Farrelly said, “I have an entire chapter that is just about the history of news, even though this is a crazy story involving corpse skinning and stabbing of wet nurses and baby stealing - and we didn’t even get to the incest yet.” Her book was not an exhaustive history of the Gilded Age, but that she used the lives of these three people to explore the 19th century, she said. Farrelly said the growing newspaper system and the railroad were two reasons why the three main characters in her book were not able to escape their past lives and start again quietly in Wyoming. There was too much connecting their past secrets to them. Joseph Adelman asked Farrelly if she thought people had the “right to be forgotten.” “I’m a historian, a novelist, and a journalist. You get all this information, and what are you going to do with it?” said Farrelly. Farrelly related the question to the 21st century, which she called the “digital age.” She said the mistakes people make, which are written about and archived on the Internet, make it impossible to be forgotten. “As a consequence of writing this book, I actually do not believe we should have the right to be forgotten,” said Farrelly. She said people should instead learn to process others’ past mistakes differently, with more sympathy. “I would rather see all of us think about the reality that human beings change - that we all have done humiliating things … and maybe the story of Ray, Jack, and Edith can help us think about these issues,” she added.