I write historical fiction based on the lives of my ancestors: Agnes Canon’s War is the story of my twice-great grandparents during the Civil War. An Irish Wife is based on their son. I write about the Gilded Age, which is only now drawing the attention of historical novelists and the wider public: the vast wealth of industrialists contrasted to the poverty of the lower classes, scandalous politics, environmental degradation, fear of and prejudices about immigrants. My ancestors lived through those days; I want to imagine how that tumultuous society affected them, how they managed, what they lost and gained, and to memorialize those stories as a way to honor them.
Before there were Daniel Day Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer, there was the book that brought them together (in the movie): Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Wharton’s lush, sepia-toned tale of the New York haut ton of the 1870s. Gilded Age society at its best; it won the 1921 Pulitzer for fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the prize. Read it first, then stream the movie. I loved its opulent portrayal of the well-heeled society of upper-class New York and its spot-on portrayal of moral hypocrisy. The battles that nineteenth-century women of all classes fought to live their lives with integrity and honesty seem to me to echo today in the ongoing injustices perpetrated against society’s powerless.
Edith Wharton's novel reworks the eternal triangle of two women and a man in a strikingly original manner. When about to marry the beautiful and conventional May Welland, Newland Archer falls in love with her very unconventional cousin, the Countess Olenska. The consequent drama, set in New York during the 1870s, reveals terrifying chasms under the polished surface of upper-class society as the increasingly fraught Archer struggles with conflicting obligations and desires. The first woman to do so, Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for this dark comedy of manners which was immediately recognized as one of her greatest achievements.
No glitter here. Though Germinal takes place in the 186os, it was written in 1884, and Gilded Age sensibilities haunt this tale of the crushing lives of French coal miners whose labor, hardships, and deaths fuel the excesses of Gilded Age lives. Zola’s masterpiece, with several movie adaptations to choose from.
Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolise the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted 'Germinal! Germinal!'. The central figure, Etienne Lantier, is an outsider who enters the community and eventually leads his fellow-miners in a strike protesting against pay-cuts - a strike which becomes a losing battle against starvation, repression, and sabotage. Yet despite all the violence and disillusion which rock the mining community to its foundations,…
Two volumes, nearly a thousand pages—but don’t let that put you off. This is the background story of the Gilded Age in small-town America, a microcosm of all that was best and worst in the era. Coal mines—a theme running through much Gilded Age tale-telling—and vast riches, sexual misadventures in a time when Victorian straitjackets were loosening, neighborly battles, far-reaching strikes, religious convulsions, political shenanigans. They’re all here. You’ll get lost in them.
"...encompasses thirty-five years in the life of the small Ohio town of Paradise Falls, from the end of the Civil War to the tumultuous opening of the twentieth century."
And now to nonfiction. For anyone who savors the study of history as a prelude to the present, this is the book to read. The Gilded Age, rife with economic and technologic disruptions and the clash between the ever-richer and the always-poor, driven by industrial juggernauts and riven by raucous, violent politics—to understand the era and see the roots of many of today’s issues, this book is a must.
A penetrating, character-filled history “in the manner of David McCullough” (WSJ), revealing the deep roots of our tormented present-day politics.
Democracy was broken. Or that was what many Americans believed in the decades after the Civil War. Shaken by economic and technological disruption, they sought safety in aggressive, tribal partisanship. The results were the loudest, closest, most violent elections in U.S. history, driven by vibrant campaigns that drew our highest-ever voter turnouts. At the century’s end, reformers finally restrained this wild system, trading away participation for civility in the process. They built a calmer, cleaner democracy, but also a more…
Delicious fact that reads like fiction and tells a story of Gilded Age power politics. Presidential scandals? Nothing new here. The tale of the illegitimate son of the 22nd and 24th president and the boy’s defenseless mother perfectly illustrates the sexual upheavals of the era and the workings of a society steaming along in an effort to keep pace with the changes of the new industrial era.
The child was born on September 14, 1874, at the only hospital in Buffalo, New York, that offered maternity services for unwed mothers. It was a boy, and though he entered the world in a state of illegitimacy, a distinguished name was given to this newborn: Oscar Folsom Cleveland. The son of the future president of the United States-Grover Cleveland. The story of how the man who held the nation's highest office eventually came to take responsibility for his son is a thrilling one that reads like a sordid romance novel-including allegations of rape, physical violence, and prostitution. The stunning…
In the brilliant society of 1880s America, King Coal fuels fortunes and drives prosperity for the privileged—and destroys the dreams and the lives of the unfortunate. Harry Robinson is the hope of his family for the next generation, expected to ride Gilded-Age momentum to the American Dream. When Harry meets Niamh, an Irish Catholic wife of a miner, he begins to understand the extent of the prejudices that stalk local immigrants. As he undertakes the job of tutoring her younger brother, he finds himself falling in love for the first time. When Niamh shows up one day bloodied and bruised, Harry is determined to take her away, despite her religious scruples and the disapproval of his family. But Niamh and her brother disappear.
In Svetlana's country, it’s a felony to break a mirror. Mirrors are conduits of the Voice, the deity worshiped by all who follow Light. The Voice protects humans of MotherLand from the dangers that beset them on all sides: an invading army of wolf-headed men on their borders and the infectious, ever-evolving, zombie-like Enemy that plagues them at home. When Svetlana meets Andrei, a traumatized and amnesiac soldier from another war, she embarks on a harrowing journey of adventure and self-discovery that leads her to question everything she was taught to…
A voice through Svetlana's mirror guides her beloved MotherLand from behind its' electric tower. The war with Wulfstan is not going as well as Sveta and her parents hope, but Sveta trusts the Voice. When her best friend Tattie goes missing, and Sveta saves Andrei, a soldier in summer uniform in the dead of winter, it takes Sveta through a crucible of Light, doubt, and back to the altar of true belief. Girl of Light unravels Sveta's beloved MotherLand in a war-torn adventure through monsters, missing eyes and broken mirrors.
