Drowning Ruth: A Novel
By Christina Schwarz
Oprah Book Club® Selection #39, September 2000
Editorial Review:
For 19th-century novelists–from Jane Austen to George Eliot, Flaubert to Henry James–social constraint gave a delicious tension to their plots. Yet now our relaxed morals and social mobility have rendered many of the classics untenable. Why shouldn’t Maisie know what she knows? It will all come out in family therapy anyway. The vogue for historical novels depends in part on our pleasure in reentering a world of subtle cues and repressed emotion, a time in which a young woman could destroy her life by saying yes to the wrong man. After all, there was no reliable birth control, no divorce, no chance of an independent life or a scandal-free separation. Continue reading »