The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann
Victoria Swann is a wildly successful romance novelist in Gilded Age Boston. She singlehandedly dispenses firm advice to starry-eyed girls (via her assistant), and keeps Thames, Royall & Quincy afloat with her breakneck pace of publication.
But the woman behind Mrs. Swann, Victoria Meeks, is tired. Her husband is an addict and a gambler, she has no time for friends given her deadlines, and while she has adoring fans, she also garners literary scorn. Not to mention her editor insists that the men in her romances commit the derring-do for plausibility purposes, despite settings on pirate ships and Egyptian pyramids.
When Thames, Royall & Quincy is bought by a scoundrel to whom her husband owes a considerable amount, Victoria goes into a freefall. She wants to write realistic works, something the literary set might respect, something real to her. She’s made the money; now she wants to make the art. Ultimately, this is the crossroads for women: to maintain “respectability” is to constrain women to an unfair status of servitude and exploitation, but to advance a woman’s plight is also to invite scorn and risk poverty.
This is a slow-moving novel, with plenty of immersive world-building of Boston at the turn of the 20th century. While some of Mrs. Swann’s purple prose swept into the narrative, this wasn’t this reader’s cup of tea, even though the sentiment behind it is one of my own soapboxes. There is a very tender subplot of Mrs. Swann’s new editor, Jonathan Cartwright, discovering love for another man that I thoroughly enjoyed. I would recommend this book to those who are familiar with the Boston area or the Gilded Age literary milieu who don’t mind a slower pace.
