If It Prove Fair Weather

by Isabel Paterson

Emmy Cruger is a middle-aged divorcee working as a teacher. She encounters businessman J.N. Wishart one day when delivering textbook proofs to his publishing company. Emmy is attracted to him, but he is a married man, and this is the 1940s, so there is a limit to what a proper lady can do.

Eventually J.N. works up the nerve to ask her to dinner. They have a good time, then go back to Emmy's apartment. Emmy wants to go further, and J.N. is certainly attracted to her, but he doesn't want to cheat on his wife.

Emmy and J.N. continue to meet off and on over the years. J.N. still can't manage to take the next step, and Emmy can't manage to cut things off, even when each encounter leaves her increasingly frustrated.

If It Prove Fair Weather is a touching story of two people trying to resolve their attraction to each other in relation to gender roles of the 1940s and marital fidelity.

212 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1940

About the author

Isabel Paterson (January 22, 1886, – January 10, 1961) was a Canadian-American journalist, novelist, political philosopher, and a leading literary critic of her day. Along with Rose Wilder Lane and Ayn Rand, who both acknowledged an intellectual debt to Paterson, she is one of the three founding mothers of American libertarianism. Paterson's best-known work, her 1943 book The God of the Machine, a treatise on political philosophy, economics, and history, reached conclusions and espoused beliefs that many libertarians credit as a foundation of their philosophy. Her biographer Stephen D. Cox (2004) believes Paterson is the "earliest progenitor of libertarianism as we know it today." Ayn Rand wrote in a letter in the 1940s that The God of the Machine "does for capitalism what Das Kapital does for the Reds and what the Bible did for Christianity."

Reviews

[Jenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some relationship with hesitation, and full of doubts. I don't know if this kind of relationship existed in reality, Its bizarre an unsound sort of affinity. They both deserve towards their unhappiness. Wishart, is a liar who's trying to break Emmy's faith in man, and Emmy was hoping for a kinship that was insolvable. In the end even she knows that what they have could never happened, Emmy still think that no one else in the world loved him, but herself.