near the time of Sarah Morewood's death in 1863. According to Shelden, the romance between Melville and Morewood was not entirely a secret in Pittsfield, especially in the case of their mutual friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., whose novel Elsie Venner (1861) was associated in Berkshire legend with Sarah Morewood. In Pittsfield, Sarah Morewood said, Elsie Venner "created a storm in many quarters." The idea at the heart of Melville in Love is that Moby-Dick, which was largely written in the months following the novelist's move to the Berkshires, was inspired in part by Melville's passion for Sarah, an obsession that drove him to manic extremes in a manner similar to Ahab's pursuit of the whale. "How strong is Shelden's case? asked Michael Lindgren in The Washington Post. "Plausible, but not definitive." Some critics see Sarah Morewood her as a figure unjustly overlooked by literary history. In the New York Journal of Books, Laura Schultz concluded, "Throughout his trials and tribulations, Melville was both inspired and sustained by the magnetic effervescence of Sarah Morewood." In the Library Journal Stefanie Hollmichel wrote, "Shelden carefully and convincingly presents his evidence regarding Morewood's influence and how she inspired Melville to a greatness recognized by few of his peers." In Booklist Donna Seaman observed, "Shelden presents the evidence gleaned through his assiduous research and performs a delving and convincing analysis of the sexual wellspring of Moby-Dick'''s violent energy and tragic majesty. Riveting in its incandescent sense of discovery, intimacy, and velocity, Shelden's bound-to-be-controversial anatomy of a clandestine love transforms our perception of Melville and introduces one of the great unsung figures in literary history." Civil War years and death Sarah Morewood died of tuberculosis at her Pittsfield home ("Broadhall," now the Country Club of Pittsfield) on October 16, 1863, still married to John Rowland Morewood, and still on close terms with her neighbor Herman Melville. During the early years of the American Civil War she was so active and generous in her support of local regiments that two military camps were named after her. At her death the Pittsfield Sun, where some of her poems were published in the 1850s and early 1860s, praised her as "a lady of superior literary accomplishments." As Stanton Garner was the first to suggest, Melville may have adapted a phrase from one of Sarah's poems ("Eager for the battle's fate/And the aspect of the war.") for the title