Back The Prodigal Women (paperback and LOA eBook Classic)

Nancy Hale: The Prodigal Women (paperback and LOA eBook Classic)

Introduction by Kate Bolick

“Nancy Hale’s prose is controlled, her sense of place precise and vivid. She had the gift of making places resonate behind her characters, and become a part of them.”—Mary Lee Settle

Overview
News & Views

Overview

Video Rediscovering the Pathbreaking Fiction of Nancy Hale
July 10, 2023

Story of the Week Nancy Hale, “The Bubble”
May 6, 2023

News Intern guest post: An author who wrote all about, and for, flawed women
April 29, 2023

Set in Boston, New York, and Virginia, The Prodigal Women tells the intertwined stories of three young women who come of age in the Roaring Twenties, not flappers and golden girls but flesh-and-blood female protagonists looking wearily—and warily—at the paths open to women in a rapidly changing world.

Leda March, “frantic with self-consciousness and envy and desire,” is the daughter of poorer relations of a prominent Boston family and an aspiring poet torn between an impulse to conformity and the pursuit of personal freedom. Betsy Jekyll, newly arrived with her family from Virginia, becomes Leda’s closest childhood friend, bringing a beguiling new warmth and openness into the New Englander’s life. But Betsy soon abandons Boston to land a job at a fashion magazine and enjoy life as a single woman in New York before falling in love with—and marrying—an abusive, controlling man. Betsy’s older sister, Maizie, a Southern belle idolized by the two younger friends and pursued by numerous men, grows tired of “running around” and fatefully looks for happiness in marriage to a turbulent artist.

When The Prodigal Women was published in 1942, its uncompromising portrayal of women’s shifting roles, open sexuality, and ambivalence toward motherhood made it a succèss de scandale, spending twenty-three weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Now Library of America restores Nancy Hale’s lost classic to print with a new introduction by Kate Bolick exploring how the novel measures “the gap between what liberation looks like, and what it actually is.”

Nancy Hale (1908–1988) was the author of eight novels, including the best-selling The Prodigal Women, four short story collections, two memoirs, two plays, children’s stories, and a biography of Mary Cassatt. The winner of ten O. Henry Awards, Hale published over two hundred stories and essays, eighty of which appeared in The New Yorker, making her one of the most prolific contributors in the magazine’s history.

Kate Bolick is the best-selling author of Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, and coauthor of March Sisters: On Life, Death, and Little Women.

The paperback edition features French flaps and has been printed on acid-free paper.
News & Views

Video Rediscovering the Pathbreaking Fiction of Nancy Hale
July 10, 2023

Story of the Week Nancy Hale, “The Bubble”
May 6, 2023

News Intern guest post: An author who wrote all about, and for, flawed women
April 29, 2023

Story of the Week Nancy Hale, “Those Are as Brothers”
May 6, 2020

Interviews Listen: Lauren Groff introduces the “wickedly smart” Nancy Hale
October 11, 2019

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-749-9 862 pages

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