"The Age of Innocence" Edith Wharton
"The Gilded Hour" Sara Donati
"Passing Strange" Martha Sandweiss
Buy these books I couldn’t wait for the debut of Julian Fellowes’ "The Gilded Age" on HBO, with those luxuriously languid afternoon teas; glittering balls on Fifth Avenue; the robber barons who rattled the cages of the old money scions; and the satin and feather-clad harpies who enforced society’s rules with an iron fist.
But if you haven’t seen the show yet, I regret to report that the reviews have been deeply meh . The New York Times declared it full of “shopworn dialogue” with characters who descend into “caricature.” And the Washington Post says it’s all “surface and no shine.”
So disappointing! Fortunately, there are some superb Gilded Age novels and nonfiction to immerse yourself in if you, too, love reading about that period in American history:
"The Age of Innocence" by Edith Wharton. The "grandmama" of all Gilded Age novels, and one of my all-time favorite books, this one stars young, naïve, and often insipid May who is about to marry Newland Archer, a man who doesn’t realize how bored he is by New York society conventions until the beautiful and experienced Countess Olenska shows up.
"The Gilded Hour" by Sara Donati tells the story of two sisters, Anna and Sophie Savard, who are doctors in a time when the few women who were trained as physicians endured scorn and suspicion. I loved this novel for its attention to the medical details of the era and the principles that each sister, one a surgeon and the other an obstetrician, carries into her work. I wish Julian Fellowes would make a series out of this book!
"Passing Strange" by Martha Sandweiss. For more than a decade, architect, writer, geologist and scientist Clarence King kept a powerful secret. He would shed his New York society persona and slip into the life of a Black man named Clarence Todd who worked as a Pullman porter and had a wife and family. King’s double life only came to light when Todd’s wife went to court to obtain the trust fund her late husband had promised her.
— Kerri Miller | MPR News
