Monday, May 29, 2017

Suited to live in a nineteenth-century novel

She felt like someone who'd lost her way and ended up in the wrong generation. She would have been much more sited to a period with structure and rank and rules, where a button undone on a glove signaled licentiousness. She could have managed quite well living within those kinds of strictures. She had read too much James and Wharton. No one in Edith Wharton's world really wanted to be there but Amelia would have got along fine inside an Edith Wharton novel. In fact, she could have happily lived inside any nineteenth century novel.
Kate Atkinson, Case Histories (New York: Little Brown & Co., 2004), p. 185.

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