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Complete Novels: Boston Adventure / The Mountain Lion / The Catherine Wheel
Twenty-nine-year-old Jean Stafford made a bold entrance onto the American literary scene in 1944 when her first novel, Boston Adventure, became a surprise best seller, its style inviting comparisons to James and Proust. She followed this remarkable debut with two more acclaimed novels, The Mountain Lion (1947) and The Catherine Wheel (1952). All three works are gathered here for the first time in a single volume, allowing readers to rediscover the extraordinary talent of this midcentury master of precise prose and acute psychological insight.
Sonia Marburg, the protagonist of Boston Adventure, grows up in the North Shore village of Chichester, the daughter of a choleric marriage between immigrant parents who remain outsiders in America. Seeking to escape the material and spiritual impoverishment of her childhood, Sonia looks across the bay at the State House dome in Boston for the promise of a richer life. Her dreams seem to find fulfillment when she secures a position as secretary-companion to Miss Lucy Pride, a summer guest at the hotel where Sonia cleans rooms, and moves into Miss Pride’s Beacon Hill home. Boston Adventure is a perceptive satire of upper-class Boston society and a quicksilver portrait of a young woman trying to navigate a singular transit between very different worlds.
“Ralph was ten and Molly was eight when they had scarlet fever.” In a colloquial voice evocative of the American West, The Mountain Lion is the haunting story of Ralph and Molly Fawcett and their troubled passage from childhood. Sickly, self-conscious, and eerily precocious, brother and sister live on a walnut farm in southern California, where, outsiders at school and at home, they share an intimate, private world. That world is threatened when they begin spending summers on the Colorado ranch of their Uncle Claude. There Ralph embraces the rugged ideal of Western manhood, while Molly withdraws into uneasy solitude. As their childhood bond frays, the story moves inexorably toward a devastating conclusion.
Set in a summer house in coastal Maine, The Catherine Wheel tells of the relationship between Andrew Shipley, a lonely twelve-year-old boy angry that his best friend has abandoned him, and his adored older cousin Katharine Congreve, a wealthy woman still bitter that Andrew’s father married her cousin instead of her. Over the course of a long summer, as Andrew and Katharine become increasingly obsessed by their secret desires for revenge, the veneer of genteel society begins to crack. In lyrical prose at once sharp-witted and mournful, Stafford spins out the tragic consequences of jealousy, resentment, and spiritual isolation.
Sonia Marburg, the protagonist of Boston Adventure, grows up in the North Shore village of Chichester, the daughter of a choleric marriage between immigrant parents who remain outsiders in America. Seeking to escape the material and spiritual impoverishment of her childhood, Sonia looks across the bay at the State House dome in Boston for the promise of a richer life. Her dreams seem to find fulfillment when she secures a position as secretary-companion to Miss Lucy Pride, a summer guest at the hotel where Sonia cleans rooms, and moves into Miss Pride’s Beacon Hill home. Boston Adventure is a perceptive satire of upper-class Boston society and a quicksilver portrait of a young woman trying to navigate a singular transit between very different worlds.
“Ralph was ten and Molly was eight when they had scarlet fever.” In a colloquial voice evocative of the American West, The Mountain Lion is the haunting story of Ralph and Molly Fawcett and their troubled passage from childhood. Sickly, self-conscious, and eerily precocious, brother and sister live on a walnut farm in southern California, where, outsiders at school and at home, they share an intimate, private world. That world is threatened when they begin spending summers on the Colorado ranch of their Uncle Claude. There Ralph embraces the rugged ideal of Western manhood, while Molly withdraws into uneasy solitude. As their childhood bond frays, the story moves inexorably toward a devastating conclusion.
Set in a summer house in coastal Maine, The Catherine Wheel tells of the relationship between Andrew Shipley, a lonely twelve-year-old boy angry that his best friend has abandoned him, and his adored older cousin Katharine Congreve, a wealthy woman still bitter that Andrew’s father married her cousin instead of her. Over the course of a long summer, as Andrew and Katharine become increasingly obsessed by their secret desires for revenge, the veneer of genteel society begins to crack. In lyrical prose at once sharp-witted and mournful, Stafford spins out the tragic consequences of jealousy, resentment, and spiritual isolation.
- GenresLiteratureNovels
904 pages, Hardcover
Published November 19, 2019
2 people are currently reading
64 people want to read
About the author
Jean Stafford
78 books94 followersJean Stafford was an American short story writer and novelist, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 23, 2022
Read just Boston Adventure. Brilliant writing, brilliant insights and yet - I was so glad to be done with the book.
January 17, 2024
If I could, I'd give it NEGATIVE stars! The narrator kept accenting the wrong syllables and pausing in odd places so you'd think she had reached the end of a sentence in the middle. Every minute or so I had to forward a "note" of explanation so I could continue the actual storyline. I will NOT listen to any more books by this author. They may be good to READ as you would not get the narration problems and can skip all the notes.
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February 1, 2020Fiction S779n 2019
August 10, 2024
While I thoroughly enjoyed Boston Adventure and The Mountain Lion I could not seem to make my way through The Catherine Wheel. Perhaps some other time I may give another try.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews