Abstract

Female Decorum

The article focuses on the book "Years of Grace," by Margaret Ayer Barnes. The book is a woman's novel about a woman's loves. And its limitations lie in the fact that it is so unmistakably, so exclusively feminine. In the book one sees the character Jane Ward, in the course of her pilgrimage from fourteen to fifty, in love three times, or rather in love twice and married once. When she is seventeen she loves the nineteen-year-old sculptor son of a French consul and an Englishwoman, when she is twenty she is married to a rising young banker whom her family looks on with a kindly eye and when she is thirty-six she falls in love again, with an agreeable vagabond who happens to be married to her best friend. And in each case she behaves with seemliness, with decorum, as her family expects her to, a little against wishes of her own heart, except that she thinks her heart so unreliable a guide.