By Taylor Jasmine | On December 11, 2016 | Updated May 18, 2023 | Comments (0)
The House of Mirth was the first novel by Edith Wharton. Her first book of stories, The Greater Inclination, was published in 1899. Published in 1905, The House of Mirth is the story of Lily Bart, an ambitious woman of New York City’s high society at the turn of the twentieth century.
Lily Bart is well-bred but has no money, and at age twenty-nine, is closing in on permanent spinsterhood. In those times, that was nothing less than tragic. The story is of her downward spiral over the course of about two years.
Her troubling decline was seen as a commentary on a corrupt and heartless upper class. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On December 2, 2016 | Updated September 16, 2023 | Comments (3)
Kate Chopin is best known for her short novel The Awakening, published in 1899. One critic who admired the writing style but questioned the motives of the book was none other than Willa Cather.
Cather’s review of The Awakening was mixed, though she offered a thoughtful analysis and compares some aspects of the book to Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary:
Many other critics weren’t as kind. Some reviled the book and it was widely banned for decades after its publication. The story’s main character, Edna Pontellier, craves a life and identity outside of society’s traditional roles as wife and mother. That made the slim novel quite controversial. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On November 12, 2016 | Updated January 10, 2026 | Comments (0)
Of Betty Smith’s (1896 – 1972), four novels, it’s for her first, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) that she’s best remembered. Joy in the Morning, her second novel (1947) has many autobiographical elements, much like her first.
It weaves its narrative around the challenges of New York’s Irish immigrant families, their struggles with poverty, and one young woman’s coming of age.
Though it’s populated with different characters, Joy in the Morning picks up where A Tree Grows in Brooklyn left off. Here, instead of Francie Nolan, we have Annie McGairy as the novel’s heroine. It begins in 1927 in Brooklyn, when Annie meets and falls in love with Carl Brown. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On October 30, 2016 | Updated October 2, 2022 | Comments (0)
Consenting Adult by Laura Z. Hobson is a 1975 novel that, surprising as it may seem now, was a much ahead-of-its time novel about a teenage boy coming out as gay to his parents.
So much so, that the term “coming out” wasn’t yet a common term; “gay” was on the radar already, but the more common term was simply homosexual.
The story begins in 1960 and is seem mostly through the lens of Tessa Lynn, the mother of seventeen-year-old Jeff. Though still unusual for its time as a sensitive (and, as it turned out, somewhat autobiographical) portrayal of a gay youth coming to terms (and coming of age) with his identity, reviewers found much to admire in the novel. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On October 14, 2016 | Updated March 15, 2026 | Comments (0)
My Ántonia is considered one of the masterpieces of fiction by Willa Cather (1873 –1947). Published in 1918, it’s the last of her “prairie trilogy” of novels, preceded by O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark.
Set in 19th-century Nebraska, the novel follows the life of Jim Burden, an orphan boy from Virginia, and Ántonia Shimerda, the eldest daughter in an immigrant family from Bohemia (once part of Czechoslovakia).
The first year in the prairie leaves a potent impression on Ántonia and Jim, a theme that’s developed through the narrative. Cather created a book of singular beauty and simplicity, in which the theme of community is united with her talent for creating character development. Read More→
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