Daughter of Today

In 1894, Sara Jeannette Duncan delivered a sharp, stylish portrait of a young woman trying to become herself. Elfrida Bell flees the American Midwest for Paris, where she pursues art, and then London, where she attempts journalism. Along the way, she absorbs the radical ideas of her moment: Aestheticism, fin-de-siècle Decadence, the daring notion of the "New Woman" who rejects bourgeois conventions. Duncan watches her heroine with a knowing, slightly ironic eye. Elfrida pursues self-creation with bracing energy, but also with the pretension and affectation that accompany any earnest attempt to construct an identity from the ideals of one's age. The result is a witty, nuanced novel about what it costs to be modern, and whether the self we build is ever truly our own.