A Daughter of To-Day

Elfrida Bell is too smart for Sparta, Illinois. Everyone in her small town expects her to marry well and tend a home, the way her mother did. But Elfrida has read the magazines, the novels, the promises that France is a land of intellectual freedom where women of ambition can forge their own destinies. She escapes to Paris with her sketchbook and her aspirations, convinced that the life she's imagined is waiting for her. What she finds is messier. The romantic France of her books does not translate to everyday reality. Independence is harder than anticipated, money runs short, and the freedoms she pursued prove more complicated than she dreamed. Sara Jeannette Duncan, herself a pioneering journalist and feminist, writes with sharp observation about the gap between what literature promises young women and what the world actually allows. This is a novel about the painful, necessary disenchantment that accompanies growing up female and ambitious in a world not quite ready for you.