Your Affectionate Godmother

A wickedly stylish guide to love, power, and survival in Edwardian society, delivered through letters from a godmother who refuses to let her goddaughter stumble blindly into adulthood. Caroline is about to emerge from the cosseted world of girlhood into the treacherous waters of the marriage market, and her godmother has returned from Paris with some blunt truths: know your worth, understand the game, and for heaven's sake, never deceive yourself about your own desires. What begins as advice on beauty and comportment quickly becomes something sharper: a wry, often candid examination of how women navigate a world built tocommodify them. The godmother distinguishes between American directness and English artifice with gleeful precision, and her guidance on matters of the heart is refreshingly unsentimental. Glyn, who scandalized readers with her novel It, brings the same knowing provocativeness to these epistolary exchanges, layering practical wisdom beneath surface propriety. The result is a book that feels less like Victorian moralizing and more like a secret shared between women who understand exactly how the world works.