Virna Woods (1864–1903)

This realist novel of 1894 was quite a surprise to me. I had no idea that any American authors at the time (i.e. before Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900)) were writing serious fiction about middle-class women and men in sexual relationships outside of marriage, and the blatant double standard by which the men were judged so differently from the women, when these relationships became known.

Stella Merriam grows up in comfortable upper-middle-class affluence in Ohio. She has great musical and intellectual abilities, and by the time she is 19 she has lost the religious faith to which she was raised. Nonetheless because of her love of playing the organ, she continues as the organist at her church. When Allan Harold, a married man, a journalist, and a tenor, moves to town and joins her church, they fall deeply in love. Allan invites Stella to elope to California with him and live as his wife, and she agrees.

Most of the story is set in San Francisco, including Chinatown. This regional and ethnic aspect of the novel is by itself extremely interesting. But the experiences of Stella and her female friends in circa 1890 San Francisco will be of strong interest as well to anyone who wants to know about the social restraints on women of this time. (And the book is well written, too.) I was somewhat disappointed with the ending, but we can't have everything.… (más)