Our Revolution

A daughter’s memoir of her mother evolves beautifully into a narrative of the sweeping changes in women’s lives in the twentieth century.

Our Revolution, vivid and rich, reads like a nineteenth-century novel as we follow the love story of a woman and her family through the twentieth-century civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements. Born into Boston society in 1923, Jenny Moore rebelled by going to college and later emerged as a writer. At twenty-one, she married Paul Moore, a decorated war hero who became Bishop Paul Moore, and joined him in a socially radical ministry. Eventually, they had nine children. “Everything was just starting,” Jenny protested—meaning a new independent life inspired by the women’s rights movement—when she was diagnosed with cancer at fifty.

Jenny bequeathed her eldest daughter her unfinished writing, and there Honor Moore finds the mother whose loss had long haunted her. Our Revolution is a gripping account of two women navigating the twentieth century and a daughter’s story of the mother who shaped her life as an artist and a woman.

About the Author: Honor Moore is the author of The Bishop's Daughter, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; The White Blackbird, a New York Times Notable Book; and three poetry collections. A professor at the New School, she lives in New York City.