Liza Bennett, author of four novels set in the Berkshires, turns to creative nonfiction to tell the fascinating, little-known story of the enduring friendship between America’s first great woman artist and a charismatic leader of the suffragist movement. It was Anita Pollitzer who first showed Georgia O’Keeffe’s work to family friend and mentor Alfred Stieglitz, the world-famous photographer whose 291 gallery in New York City was the epicenter of the modern art world. While O’Keeffe, Stieglitz, and their circle of friends were at the forefront of American modernism, Pollitzer became a leader of the National Woman’s Party and was instrumental in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote.

Of local interest, the book explores the many decades that O’Keeffe spent at Stieglitz’s home on Lake George, a period that started with great creative output for the artist and ended in personal turmoil. Based on extensive research, including their fifty-year correspondence, Georgia & Anita casts light on the friendship of these two women who, in different ways, helped to modernize the world and women’s roles in it.