The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

There is so much potential in Myra MacPherson's The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age. Victoria Woodhull and Tennie Claflin make fascinating protagonists who led amazing lives. As the book notes, Victoria and Tennie were "two sisters whose radical views on sex, love, politics, and business threatened the white male power structure of the nineteenth century and shocked the world." Or, as the saying goes, well behaved women rarely make history.

In the opening chapters, my hopes were high that Scarlet Sisters would be similar to the Hetty Green biography I read last year. Unfortunately, fairly quickly Scarlet Sisters bogged down in nitty-gritty (largely political) details such that the potential was largely unrealized. Too often I felt that the larger story was sacrificed to what I felt was MacPherson's personal agenda (writing Scarlet Sisters as a counter to the current "war against women"). This is unfortunate because I assume almost anyone reading this book is firmly in her corner already, and would have appreciated a good story more than dozens of detailed pages on the competing factions of the women's suffrage movement, the hypocrisy of the church (we're looking at you, Mr. Beecher) or the possible motivations of the overzealous Anthony Comstock.

In the end, I struggled to finish Scarlet Sisters, which is a shame, as it would have been a good forerunner to Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern.

When the World Was Young

Elizabeth Gaffney's When the World Was Young defies easy categorization. Essentially, it is the coming of age of Wally Baker. After the death of her glamorous mother, Stella, Wally, lives with her grandparents, but is largely raised by their black maid, Loretta, in the years after World War II. Gradually, Wally comes to see the complexities unfairness of life in a gradual stripping away of innocence.

When the World Was Young is beautifully written, with prose that transports the reader into Wally's world: Brooklyn, circa 1950. The characters, too, are distinct and sympathetic, even the wildly unstable Stella whose life has been marred by a series of disappointments and tragedies. This is a lovely read, a book that is hard to put down, and one that any lover of fiction should enjoy.

The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America

Electricity is such an ingrained part of our lives that we rarely think of it, unless we happen - temporarily, God willing - to be without it. So it's hard to imagine the entire world before electric lights - the sheer and utter darkness that enveloped everyone and everything from sundown to sunup. Obviously, then, the arrival of electricity was the one of the seminal events of their lives for millions across the world.

Ernest Freeberg works hard to make the reader feel the excitement caused by the electrification of America (with the occasional visit across the pond to England, France, and Germany). He traces the arrival of light from the various oils to gas to, finally, the incandescent light bulb. (Sidenote: Thomas Edison was 32 when he invented the incandescent light bulb.  I learned this in the opening pages of Freeberg's The Age of Edison and spent the rest of the book feeling only slightly inconsequential.)

Electricity was not without controversy as the electric companies, in the era of robber barons, worked to part individuals and municipalities alike from their money as quickly as possible, often while stringing miles of dangerously hung wires. Americans of the day were treated to regular news headlines of men, children, even horses electrocuted by a dangling or fallen wire.

The Age of Edison is an interesting read, though slightly dry, and rather too technical at times. Freeberg notes at one point that, "Few in the public could follow the heated, technical, and contradictory claims made by the rival companies...or the bickering between city inspectors..." I know the feeling.

The Fortune Hunter

I am disappointingly ambivalent about Daisy Goodwin's The Fortune Hunter.

Charlotte Baird is soon to be the richest woman in England - once she reaches her majority and inherits the Lennox fortune, that is. And so, as might be expected in Downton Abbey-era England, Charlotte has no shortage of suitors, even once they discover her quirks, such as a love of photography and disdain for fashion. Unfortunately, she's falling in love with Bay Middleton, a cavalry captain deemed utterly unsuitable by her older brother (and guardian) Frank, and his insufferable fiancee, Lady Augusta Crewe. Bay, however, has been drafted to pilot the Empress of Austria around England for the hunt season, and with each hunt seems to fall further under her spell.

All of the characters are real people: some, such as the Empress, achieved lasting fame (and infamy) in their lives. Others, like Bay Middleton "the hardest rider in England" have fallen into obscurity, before Goodwin plucked them out and brought them back to life. Her writing is rich, and the research painstaking. She transports her readers into the era and events depicted on the page, without anything feeling forced. I simply had a difficult time caring too much what happened to the characters, perhaps because they are real and Lady Mountbatten and the Countess of Carnarvon have provided a glimpse of what their lives actually looked like.