The Radcliffe Ladies’ Reading Club
This novel is set in 1955 Cambridge. Alice Campbell, dislocated divorcée, has opened a small bookstore and initiated a reading club with four interested Radcliffe College freshmen: Tess, Caroline, Merritt, and Evie. Each of the girls comes from different social backgrounds and has different personalities. It is Alice’s hope that she and the young women will find comfort, challenge, and feminine comradery in reading books such as Jane Eyre, The Age of Innocence, and Anna Karenina.
The first two-thirds of this novel largely read like synopses of the reading club meetings. The students’ characters do not have much depth; the reader does not even get a real sense of their lives as Radcliffe students—or even of Radcliffe College itself. An end-of-year dance looms, and the girls are excited about attending with Harvard men. Unfortunately, Caroline is brutally raped, painfully assaulted, and dumped on a country road by a Harvard man who is not even her date. The rest of the novel largely focuses on Caroline’s distressing pregnancy, alienation from her wealthy socialite parents, miscarriage, and financial recovery thanks to a grandmother’s trust fund. All of this reads like a string of clichés. Alice Campbell, who started as the novel’s interesting protagonist, gets lost in the melodrama. If the author’s intent is to illuminate the women in academia during the 1950s, she paints a poor picture.
