Priceless Pearl

Pearl Leavitt has a problem most women would envy: she's so devastatingly beautiful that every office where she types memos and files invoices becomes a disaster zone of distracted men and shattered productivity. She gets fired again and again, not for incompetence, but for being too pretty to function in a professional setting. It's a clever, biting premise that Alice Duer Miller exploits for both comedy and social commentary. Fed up with Manhattan's shallow expectations, Pearl escapes to the Hamptons to work as a governess for three insufferably spoiled children, hoping beauty might be an asset among the country set. Of course, it isn't that simple. The novel is a sparkling early twentieth-century comedy of manners, threading needle-sharp observations about what women were supposed to be and what they were actually allowed to do into a romance that feels genuinely earned. Miller writes with a wit that still zings a century later, and Pearl is a heroine whose cleverness finally gets to match her looks.