Eighteen-year-old Pauline Van Corlear makes a calculated choice: marry the wealthy, much older Hamilton Varick to secure her future in Gilded Age New York. But security proves a gilded cage. As Pauline navigates the drawing rooms of Manhattan society, she finds herself caught between the role she's been assigned and the self she secretly dreams of becoming. When widowhood finally grants her freedom, the real battle begins. Fawcett, writing with sharp social satire, dissects the marriage market as ruthlessly as any Austen or Wharton, exposing how women of a certain class were taught to trade their youth for financial survival. The novel pulses with Pauline's quiet rebellion: her ambiguous feelings toward her husband, her chemistry with her cousin Courtlandt, her dawning awareness that independence means nothing without the courage to claim it. A forgotten gem of American feminist fiction that reads as both period artifact and startlingly modern commentary on what society costs the women it pretends to protect.
