Alimony

by Faith Baldwin

Cuthrell, Faith Baldwin

Genres: Fiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1931

About the author

Faith Baldwin attended private academies and finishing schools, and in 1914-16 she lived in Dresden, Germany. She married Hugh H. Cuthrell in 1920, and the next year she published her first novel, Mavis of Green Hill. Although she often claimed she did not care for authorship, her steady stream of books belies that claim; over the next 56 years she published more than 85 books, more than 60 of them novels with such titles as Those Difficult Years (1925), The Office Wife (1930), Babs and Mary Lou (1931), District Nurse (1932), Manhattan Nights (1937), and He Married a Doctor (1944). Her last completed novel, Adam's Eden, appeared in 1977.

Typically, a Faith Baldwin book presents a highly simplified version of life among the wealthy. No matter what the difficulties, honour and goodness triumph, and hero and heroine are united. Evil, depravity, poverty, and sex found no place in her work, which she explicitly intended for the housewife and the working girl. The popularity of her writing was enormous. In 1936, in the midst of the Great Depression, she published five novels in magazine serial form and three earlier serials in volume form and saw four of her works made into motion pictures, for an income that year in excess of $315,000. She also wrote innumerable stories, articles, and newspaper columns, no less ephemeral than the novels.

Reviews

[Nicholas George · Rating 2 out of 5]

This melodramatic little potboiler, written in the 1920s, has little to recommend it; however, it is fascinating in how it shows the powerlessness of women of that era. If you were a woman, you had very few options for getting by in life: you could either get married (the path most women took) and let your husband provide for you, or you could try to make it on your own (very difficult in a society that didn't value working women). Divorce had only begun to become marginally acceptable when this novel was written. Although it still came with a heavy whiff of scandal and disapproval, it allowed some women to break free of a loveless union. It is interesting that in this book, written by a woman, the men are the 'victims' of divorce (because of exorbitant alimony demands) and most of the women (except for the good, and ironically named, Eve) are shallow, conniving gold diggers. But then again, they could be seen as making their way the best way they could in a world where the odds were stacked against them.