ŷ������

Published in America in 1929, Ursula Parrott’s semi-autobiographical novel is very different in flavour from most interwar women’s novels I’ve encountered. Although Parrot’s work and her frank depiction of the experiences of a young wife, later divorced, overlaps with the territory of writers like Jean Rhys and Irmgard Keun, Parrott’s approach is less stylised than Rhys’s and more clinical than Keun’s. A controversial sensation when it first appeared, it was later adapted for Hollywood. It centres on 24-year-old Patricia or Pat who’s part of the “flapper�� generation. She’s well-educated, seemingly independent-minded, yet enmeshed in an abusive marriage to Peter, who then leaves her for another woman who is, as he puts it, more “pure.�� Parrott’s presentation of their breakup is unsparing, detailing domestic violence, and a perilous backstreet abortion. The end of the marriage is followed by life as one of New York’s growing number of “ex-wives.��

The novel’s narrated by Patricia, who peppers her account with a series of wonderfully wry asides, and I found her self-portrait fascinating. She’s clearly been programmed by her upbringing to keep up appearances so she’s always abreast of fashion and immaculately turned out; she’s studiously polite to men yet painfully aware the circles she inhabits are riddled with hypocrisy and contradictions, and potentially toxic for women adrift. She lunches at the Algonquin and writes advertising copy for a department store by day, frequenting clubs and speakeasies by night, and the men she meets consider her fair game up to and including rape. Parrott’s narrative contains some dry passages and moments that verge on melodrama but there are also a succession of memorable lines and instances of biting social commentary. Invaluable as social history it’s an uncomfortable, but frequently compelling, snapshot of life in a deeply misogynistic, post-war America.