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New Girl Book Reviews
Oct. 17th, 2011 02:49 pmSince last June I’ve been meaning to write some mini-reviews of books I used for my honors project ("The New Girl: Reconciling Femininity and Independence in American Girls' Fiction, 1895-1915"). But better late than never!
1. Shirley Marchalonis’s College Girls: A Century in Fiction, which is about fiction written about women’s colleges between the 1870s and 1940s or so and must have been the most fun EVER to research. I actually ended up reading two of the series she mentioned. The Betty Wales books were clear winners in terms of quality, but the Molly Brown books blew them out of the water for sheer cracktasticness.
Aside from Molly, a red-headed Kentucky belle with a talent for poetry and occasional bursts of telepathy, they feature:
2. My favorite favorite FAVORITE book from my project is Christine Stansell’s American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century, which I loved so much that I’m applying to U Chicago purely because she works there.
The research is exhaustive and broad-ranging, and the subjects encompassed – bohemians! Emma Goldman! modern art! the invention of heterosexuality as we know it! – are fascinating But more than anything, the writing is phenomenal: clear but nuanced, possessed of the narrative drive of a good novel, but never taking liberties with history. If I wrote a book like this I could die happy.
Damn, I miss being a student.
1. Shirley Marchalonis’s College Girls: A Century in Fiction, which is about fiction written about women’s colleges between the 1870s and 1940s or so and must have been the most fun EVER to research. I actually ended up reading two of the series she mentioned. The Betty Wales books were clear winners in terms of quality, but the Molly Brown books blew them out of the water for sheer cracktasticness.
Aside from Molly, a red-headed Kentucky belle with a talent for poetry and occasional bursts of telepathy, they feature:
- A Japanese exchange student (in 1914! This may be surprising but it’s historically plausible; the first female Japanese exchange student attended college in the US, at I believe Bryn Mawr, in the 1870s)
- A famous suffragette’s daughter
- A mean rich girl who is eventually saved by the love of a good woman (I am so not making that up)
- A Florentine kleptomaniac classmate who works silver. (Kleptomania was apparently the hot new mental disorder. The Betty Wales books, generally much soberer than the Molly Brown, also contain one.)
- An Appalachian mountain girl who is attending college because all her male relations were killed in a mountain feud
- A female painter named Jo, who lives in Paris and wears Turkish trousers
- And Jo’s buddy/boyfriend/whatever, Polly, a long-haired Cubist painter.
2. My favorite favorite FAVORITE book from my project is Christine Stansell’s American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century, which I loved so much that I’m applying to U Chicago purely because she works there.
The research is exhaustive and broad-ranging, and the subjects encompassed – bohemians! Emma Goldman! modern art! the invention of heterosexuality as we know it! – are fascinating But more than anything, the writing is phenomenal: clear but nuanced, possessed of the narrative drive of a good novel, but never taking liberties with history. If I wrote a book like this I could die happy.
Damn, I miss being a student.
