Perhaps more significantly, Frances will repeatedly wrestle with the prospect of marrying and how it might affect her ability to keep writing. She begins life in New York City in a home for single women where they are institutionalized and infantilized, denied true independence. In contrast, Frances faces a gauntlet of challenges-a father and sister who need her care, the necessity of working in a secretarial position, and the sexism endemic to the period. Bernard is wealthy, Harvard-educated and well-connected in the New York City literary scene. While a romance between Frances and Bernard is fraught with traps, there can be no doubt how they got into it: sparks fly between them in the form of remarkably erudite, vividly written letters that only artists of equal and impressive calibre could have produced.Īt the beginning, the balance of power between the protagonists is uneven at best. When they first meet at the colony, Bernard says to Frances that men "have a tendency to wreck beautiful things." His words may prove prophetic in the years that follow, as their friendship progresses into a complex and tormented sort of love. The two strike up a correspondence that is to reverberate down the years, across continents, and will ultimately shape the course of their lives. Harvard graduate Bernard Eliot is also Catholic, but has a pronounced Dionysian streak and writes poetry reminiscent of the sensuous John Donne. Frances Reardon is a devoutly religious Catholic and hard at work on her first novel. That time is reflected in many aspects of the book, from Frances's dilemmas as a woman trying to make her way as a writer in New York City, to the epistolary structure itself-far different set in the late 1950s than it would be if it involved e-mail in contemporary times.Ī writer's colony in 1957 sets the scene for the fateful meeting of two young writers. In Carlene Bauer's debut novel, Frances and Bernard, the intricacies of a relationship are recounted through a years-long correspondence, a device suited to the period in which the novel is set, the 1950s. Cheryl Krocker McKeon, bookseller, Book Passage, San Francisco While most 2013 communication might be via texts and tweets, reading these letter-writers could inspire you to purchase stationery and a sheet of forever stamps, just in time for Valentine's Day. Letters and telegrams fly across the English Channel between author Juliet and the charming citizens of Guernsey, so recently deprived of communication during the World War II Nazi occupation of their island.Īgoraphobic Bernadette is lucky to live in a world of multiple means of communication that allow her to remain reclusive, including e-mail, school memos, NPR weather bulletins, police reports and tape recordings, all neatly linked by her daughter, tech-savvy teen narrator Bee, in Maria Semple's hilarious 2012 Where'd You Go, Bernadette. Peeking into a stranger's mail suggests a surreptitious intimacy, and Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer's beloved 2008 Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society epitomizes the epistolary form. ( Lipogram: a writing composed of words not having a certain letter.) When the town leaders ban specific letters, one at a time, writing requires increasing cleverness in Mark Dunn's 2001 "progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable," a cautionary tale to delight wordsmiths and Scrabble addicts. Bess was indeed ahead of her time, yet her letters flow from the pen of a proper lady, and this novel is a delightful peek at her era.Įlla Minnow Pea's island paradise is named after the man who wrote the iconic sentence using every letter: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Her correspondence spans half a century and is rich in history (aboard the Lusitania, Kennedy's assassination). Thirty-five years ago Elizabeth Forsyth Hailey introduced Bess Steed Garner in A Woman of Independent Means, whose first letter in 1899 was to her fourth grade pal, later her husband. As our reviewer noted, the 1950s setting lends itself to this epistolary form. Today's release of Carlene Bauer's debut, Frances and Bernard (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) marks a new opportunity for readers to meet literary characters through their correspondence.
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