A Well-Behaved Woman

Author: Therese Anne Fowler
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250095492
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Book Description
The New York Times and USA Today bestseller The riveting novel of iron-willed Alva Vanderbilt and her illustrious family as they rule Gilded-Age New York, written by Therese Anne Fowler, a New York Times bestselling author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald. Alva Smith, her southern family destitute after the Civil War, married into one of America’s great Gilded Age dynasties: the newly wealthy but socially shunned Vanderbilts. Ignored by New York’s old-money circles and determined to win respect, she designed and built nine mansions, hosted grand balls, and arranged for her daughter to marry a duke. But Alva also defied convention for women of her time, asserting power within her marriage and becoming a leader in the women's suffrage movement. With a nod to Jane Austen and Edith Wharton, in A Well-Behaved Woman Therese Anne Fowler paints a glittering world of enormous wealth contrasted against desperate poverty, of social ambition and social scorn, of friendship and betrayal, and an unforgettable story of a remarkable woman. Meet Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, living proof that history is made by those who know the rules—and how to break them.

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

Author: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307472779
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
From admired historian—and coiner of one of feminism's most popular slogans—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich comes an exploration of what it means for women to make history. In 1976, in an obscure scholarly article, Ulrich wrote, "Well behaved women seldom make history." Today these words appear on t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, greeting cards, and all sorts of Web sites and blogs. Ulrich explains how that happened and what it means by looking back at women of the past who challenged the way history was written. She ranges from the fifteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan, who wrote The Book of the City of Ladies, to the twentieth century’s Virginia Woolf, author of A Room of One's Own. Ulrich updates their attempts to reimagine female possibilities and looks at the women who didn't try to make history but did. And she concludes by showing how the 1970s activists who created "second-wave feminism" also created a renaissance in the study of history.

Well-Behaved Indian Women

Author: Saumya Dave
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1984806157
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Book Description
A Lilly's Library Book Club Pick! “A sparkling debut.”—Emily Giffin, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author From a compelling new voice in women's fiction comes a mother-daughter story about three generations of women who struggle to define themselves as they pursue their dreams. Simran Mehta has always felt harshly judged by her mother, Nandini, especially when it comes to her little "writing hobby." But when a charismatic and highly respected journalist careens into Simran's life, she begins to question not only her future as a psychologist, but her engagement to her high school sweetheart. Nandini Mehta has strived to create an easy life for her children in America. From dealing with her husband's demanding family to the casual racism of her patients, everything Nandini has endured has been for her children's sake. It isn’t until an old colleague makes her a life-changing offer that Nandini realizes she's spent so much time focusing on being the Perfect Indian Woman, she’s let herself slip away. Mimi Kadakia failed her daughter, Nandini, in ways she'll never be able to fix—or forget. But with her granddaughter, she has the chance to be supportive and offer help when it's needed. As life begins to pull Nandini and Simran apart, Mimi is determined to be the bridge that keeps them connected, even as she carries her own secret burden.

A Good Neighborhood

Author: Therese Anne Fowler
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1250237289
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Book Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * One of NPR's Best Books of 2020 "A provocative, absorbing read." — People “A feast of a read... I finished A Good Neighborhood in a single sitting. Yes, it’s that good.” —Jodi Picoult, #1New York Times bestselling author of Small Great Thingsand A Spark of Light In Oak Knoll, a verdant, tight-knit North Carolina neighborhood, professor of forestry and ecology Valerie Alston-Holt is raising her bright and talented biracial son, Xavier, who’s headed to college in the fall. All is well until the Whitmans—a family with new money and a secretly troubled teenage daughter—raze the house and trees next door to build themselves a showplace. With little in common except a property line, these two families quickly find themselves at odds: first, over an historic oak tree in Valerie's yard, and soon after, the blossoming romance between their two teenagers. A Good Neighborhood asks big questions about life in America today—what does it mean to be a good neighbor? How do we live alongside each other when we don't see eye to eye?—as it explores the effects of class, race, and heartrending love in a story that’s as provocative as it is powerful.

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

Author: Therese Fowler
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250028655
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
"When I saw that Amazon Prime was unveiling its original pilot for Z, a biographical series based on Therese Anne Fowler's novel about Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, I raised a wary eyebrow. . . But I was wrong, oh me of little faith. . . I]t's an enveloping period piece, perfectly cast, and I would like to see the pilot green-lighted into a series so that we can see this romance go up like a rocket with one loud champagne pop and strew debris across mansion lawns and luxury hotel lobbies in its transcontinental path." --Vanity Fair I wish I could tell everyone who thinks we're ruined, Look closer...and you'll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed. When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before long, the "ungettable" Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn't wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. Her father is deeply unimpressed. But after Scott sells his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to Scribner's, Zelda optimistically boards a train north, to marry him in the vestry of St. Patrick's Cathedral and take the rest as it comes. What comes, here at the dawn of the Jazz Age, is unimagined attention and success and celebrity that will make Scott and Zelda legends in their own time. Everyone wants to meet the dashing young author of the scandalous novel--and his witty, perhaps even more scandalous wife. Zelda bobs her hair, adopts daring new fashions, and revels in this wild new world. Each place they go becomes a playground: New York City, Long Island, Hollywood, Paris, and the French Riviera--where they join the endless party of the glamorous, sometimes doomed Lost Generation that includes Ernest Hemingway, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and Gertrude Stein. Everything seems new and possible. Troubles, at first, seem to fade like morning mist. But not even Jay Gatsby's parties go on forever. Who is Zelda, other than the wife of a famous--sometimes infamous--husband? How can she forge her own identity while fighting her demons and Scott's, too? With brilliant insight and imagination, Therese Anne Fowler's New York Times bestseller brings us Zelda's irresistible story as she herself might have told it.

Well-Behaved Women

Author: Emily Paull
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780648652113
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
A woman grapples with survivor's guilt after a body is found in her garden bed; an ageing beauty queen contemplates her past; a world champion free-diver disappears during routine training¿In moments disquieting or quietly inspiring, this collection considers the complexity of the connections we make-with our family, friends and neighbours, and with those met briefly or never at all.In her timely debut, Emily Paull voices a chorus of characters that reveal and re-evaluate the expectations of women in Australia today-after all, well-behaved women rarely make history.

It All Comes Down to This

Author: Therese Anne Fowler
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250278066
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Book Description
A JUNE INDIE NEXT PICK "A smart and lively novel." —Jess Walter, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins "Austenesque...this goes down as easily as an Aperol spritz." —Publishers Weekly With her keen eye for human foibles and emotional truth, humor and deep feeling, acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Therese Anne Fowler delivers a stylish, insightful take on the dysfunctional family dramedy. Meet the Geller sisters: Beck, Claire, and Sophie, a trio of strong-minded women whose pragmatic mother, Marti, will be dying soon. Beck, the eldest, is a freelance journalist whose marriage has long been devoid of passion, and she's recently begun to suspect that her husband, Paul, is hiding something from her. Though middle sister Claire is an accomplished pediatric cardiologist, her own heart is a mess, and her unrequited love for the wrong man is slowly destroying her. And while Sophie, the youngest, appears to have an Instagram-ready life of glamorous work and travel, her true existence is a cash-strapped house of cards that may fall at any moment. But Marti’s will surprises them with its provision that the family’s summer cottage in Maine must be sold, the proceeds split equally between the three sisters. While there’s a ready buyer in C.J. Reynolds, he’s an ex-con with a complicated past and a tangled history with one of the women. Choices and consequences, mistakes and misapprehensions, obligations and desires: before long, everyone in this cast of indelible characters will have to come to terms with the ways their lives have turned out differently than they expected, as well as the secrets they’ve been keeping from each other––and themselves.

Miss Behave

Author: Malebo Sephodi
Publisher: Blackbird Books
ISBN: 1928337538
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Book Description
Upon encountering historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s quote, ‘well-behaved women seldom make history’, Malebo Sephodi knew that she was tired of everyone else having a say on who and what she should be. Appropriating this quote, Malebo boldly renounces societal expectations placed on her as a black woman and shares her journey towards misbehavior. According to Malebo, it is the norm for a black woman to live in a society that prescribes what it means to be a well-behaved woman. Acting like this prescribed woman equals good behavior. But what happens when a black woman decides to live her own life and becomes her own form of who she wants to be? She is often seen as misbehaving. Miss-Behave challenges society’s deep-seated beliefs about what it means to be an obedient woman. In this book, Malebo tracks her journey on a path towards achieving total autonomy and self-determinism. Miss-Behave will challenge, rattle and occasionally cause you to scream ‘yassss, yassss, yassss’ at various intervals.

Reading Group Choices

Author: Reading Group Choices
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780975974476
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description

A House Full of Females

Author: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101947977
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 525

Book Description
From the author of A Midwife's Tale, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize for History, and The Age of Homespun--a revelatory, nuanced, and deeply intimate look at the world of early Mormon women whose seemingly ordinary lives belied an astonishingly revolutionary spirit, drive, and determination. A stunning and sure-to-be controversial book that pieces together, through more than two dozen nineteenth-century diaries, letters, albums, minute-books, and quilts left by first-generation Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, the never-before-told story of the earliest days of the women of Mormon "plural marriage," whose right to vote in the state of Utah was given to them by a Mormon-dominated legislature as an outgrowth of polygamy in 1870, fifty years ahead of the vote nationally ratified by Congress, and who became political actors in spite of, or because of, their marital arrangements. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, writing of this small group of Mormon women who've previously been seen as mere names and dates, has brilliantly reconstructed these textured, complex lives to give us a fulsome portrait of who these women were and of their "sex radicalism"--the idea that a woman should choose when and with whom to bear children.