From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The arrival of anarchist Lawrence Birch to the New York home of Columbine Nash, famed reformer and lecturer, has a devastating effect on the lives of Nash and her two housemates. The year is 1890 and the volcanic social and political climate of the times is fueled by the excesses of the wealthy and the radical doctrines espoused by Emma Goldman and Johan Most. Despite the historical trappings, The Gilded Cage is more about the pursuit of love and domestic happiness than the quest for the rights of women and employees of sweat shops. The many references to Columbine's past journey from abused aristocratic wife to famed progressive are tantalizing and pique the reader's interest, but also leave the reader unsatisfied. This is a solid, predictable romance for larger public libraries, by the author of Blind Trust (Evans, 1990).
- Lydia Bur ruel Johnson, Mesa P.L., Ariz.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Lydia Bur ruel Johnson, Mesa P.L., Ariz.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
