An Elegant Woman
A Novel
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3.6 • 10 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“A portrait of self-creation in the vein of F. Scott Fitzgerald”,” (The Wall Street Journal) An Elegant Woman is “a rich exploration of legacy and memory” (Entertainment Weekly) that follows four generations of women against the sweep of 20th century American history.
Drawn from the author’s own family history, this powerful, moving multigenerational saga from National Book Award finalist Martha McPhee masterfully explores the stories we tell ourselves, and what we leave out.
As Isadora, a novelist, and two of her sisters sift through the artifacts of their forebears’ lives, trying to decide what to salvage and what to toss, the story shifts to a winter day in 1910 at a train station in Ohio. Two girls wait in the winter cold with their mother—the mercurial Glenna Stewart—to depart for a new life in the West. As Glenna campaigns in Montana for women’s suffrage and teaches in one-room schoolhouses, Tommy takes care of her little sister, Katherine: trapping animals, begging, keeping house, cooking, while Katherine goes to school. When Katherine graduates, Tommy makes a decision that will change the course of both of their lives.
Told “with an easy grace many historical novels lack” (Los Angeles Times), An Elegant Woman follows one woman over the course of the 20th century, taking us from a drought-stricken Montana farm to a yellow Victorian in Maine; from the halls of a psychiatric hospital in London to a wedding gown fitting at Bergdorf Goodman; from a house in small town Ohio to a family reunion at a sweltering New Jersey pig roast. Framed by Isadora’s efforts to retell her grandmother’s journey—and understand her own—the novel is “sharp, precise, and, yes, elegant” (The Boston Globe) in its gorgeous depiction of one hundred years in a family’s history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In McPhee's ambitious if uneven latest, a novelist recounts the twists and turns of her grandmother's life. While Isadora helps her sisters and mother clean out her grandmother's house in New Jersey, she declares, "If Grammy was our version of Homer, I was Herodotus." Combining snippets of history with an admittedly embellished narrative, Isadora begins in 1910. Her grandmother, then named Tommy, is taken at five years old with her three-year-old sister, Katherine, by their indomitable mother, Glenna, from their comfortable home in Ohio to begin a harrowing existence in the American West. Glenna leaves the girls with a settler family in Miles City, Mont., while she goes to frontier towns in search of teaching work. After many vicissitudes, the sisters separate as teenagers, and Tommy makes it to New York, where she borrows Katherine's name and high school diploma to becomes a nurse, while Katherine takes the name Pat and moves to California. After the newly named Katherine marries into high society and becomes a mother and grandmother to four girls, she tells them stories about their heritage, enhancing her dramatic tales with fabrications, such as that they are descendants of Mary, Queen of Scots, and other notable figures. McPhee (Bright Angel Time) sometimes labors too diligently to follow the many threads and family myths, and leans too hard on the novelist-as-narrator frame. Still, her ambitious tale occasionally captivates.
