cover image Gilded Cage

Gilded Cage

Susannah Bamford. M. Evans and Company, $17.95 (424pp) ISBN 978-0-87131-643-1

Set at the turn of the century, the so-called Gilded Age, this absorbing romantic novel concerns three intelligent and strong-willed women, active in liberal causes, who inhabit the same house on New York City's 23rd Street. Wealthy and patrician Columbine Nash challenges a male-dominated society with her lectures on free love and women's suffrage. She is supported in her goal to establish a home for battered women by the two friends who live with her: 18-year-old Marguerite Corbeau, who conceals her Lower East Side background as Marguerite Blum and hopes to achieve a life of wealth and leisure, and the restless and unhappy Bellspok Huxton, who is repressing her years as an abused child. Lawrence Birch, a calculating and unscrupulous anarchist and sexual adventurer, drops into this household and soon manipulates the trio to his dangerous and explosive ends. The author of Blind Trust , who writes paperback romances as Jude O'Neill, nicely conveys the social fabric of New York during a transitional epoch. If this rich drama of independent but easily exploited women is sometimes illogical, it is never boring. (June)