John Singer Sargent, Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882

You’ve just stepped into a place were you are not welcome. Their gaze meets yours and you immediately go to turn away. You’ve locked eyes with the Boit daughters. They are mesmerizing, and utterly untouchable. These sisters are the focus of John Singer Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit. The girls in the painting are just as mysterious as the Lisbon sisters in Jeffrey Eugenides’ 1993 novel The Virgin Suicides.

Julia Boit, the youngest, resembles the spirit and joys of youth. While Florence and Jane, hide in the dark ashamed of the adolescence. None of the daughters in the painting ever married, and they all turned to each other for support. They were a cult in and of themselves. The Lisbon sisters of suburban Detroit allowed no one in either, and remained aloof to the outside community. Eugenides writes, “It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”

As you try to piece the Boit sisters’ stories together, you find your self faced with an impossible task. They are connected, yet eerily separated from each other. These nineteenth-century sisters’are cold and they beckon you to drop your gaze. The Lisbon sisters hold the same mystery, the closer you get to these girls you realized how far they are from reality. They are beautifully haunting, and hard to shake.