The Disagreeable Woman: A Social Mystery
1895
The Disagreeable Woman is a deliciously astringent portrait of boarding-house intrigue and hidden identities in Gilded Age New York. Horatio Alger Jr., writing as Julian Starr, subverts his own rags-to-riches formula here, turning his sharp eye not on a bootstrap-pulling hero but on a woman whose weapon is her wit and whose armor is her inscrutability. The narrator, a young physician fresh to the city and desperate for patients, becomes obsessed with discovering who this acid-tongued woman really is and what secrets hide behind her contemptuous facade. As he navigates the social currents of Mrs. Gray's boarding house, trading barbs with the earnest Professor Poppendorf and falling for the charming Ruth Canby, the Disagreeable Woman remains an enigma at the center of a web of aspiration, pretense, and suppressed desire. The real mystery isn't whodunit but what society forces people to become.
