The Lever: A Novel

Pittsburgh, 1911. Alice wants to run her father's business. She wants it more than marriage, more than the comfortable cage of femininity her world has built around her. When her childhood friend Allen Sanford reappears, he's torn between the diplomatic career expected of him and the same industrial world that calls to her. They meet in a carriage, old memories stirring, and the air between them crackles with everything they cannot say and everything they might become. William Dana Orcutt's forgotten novel captures a woman refusing to be small. Alice's hunger to make her mark in a world that forbids her from entering the room where decisions are made feels startlingly modern, even a century later. The lever of the title is ambiguous: Is it power? Social mobility? The force that might pry open a closed door? What unfolds is both a romance and a quiet war, as two childhood friends discover their ambitions may align or may shatter everything between them. For readers who loved HBO's The Gilded Age or Edith Wharton's sharper work, this is a rediscovered gem about the women history tried to forget.