April Hopes
1887
On a radiant June day at Harvard, the Class Day celebrations unfold with perfect social choreography: young couples drift through the Hymenway Gymnasium, and Elbridge Mavering wanders among them, observing. He meets Mrs. Pasmer and her daughter Alice, recently returned to New England from Europe after their investments dwindled. Mrs. Pasmer has schemes for her daughter. Dan Mavering, the easygoing son of a wealthy wallpaper manufacturer, has his own hopes. But Alice proves an unexpectedly difficult heroine: sharp-minded, morally exacting, and prone to volcanic jealousy. What begins as a calculated courtship becomes something more complicated, as Howells maps the vast distance between the rituals of romance and the messy realities of human attachment. Written with the author's new "consciousness that he was writing as a realist," this novel dissects the unspoken economics of marriage, the performance of gentility, and the way class both enables and constrains desire. It is a comedy of manners with an undercurrent of genuine sadness, capturing a society in transition between old ideals and new money.
