Susan Lenox: Her Fall & Rise (Muckrakers Series) [Paperback]

David Graham Phillips (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0829020381 | ISBN-13: 978-0829020380 | Publication Date: October 1986

The sensational Susan Lenox, whose life takes two volumes to unfold (and who has thus far been given a wholly inadequate 1931 film vehicle that starred Greta Garbo) will finally have her story told properly. When we first meet Susan she is a fresh young thing living with small-thinking relations in a small Indiana town. Her relatives marry her off to a coarse local farmer; she takes refuge on a showboat with a theater company and never stops moving. She goes from Cincinnati to New York City to Paris. She goes back and forth among tenements, hotels, and theaters. She goes from being a street prostitute to a kept woman to an independent woman and from impassive disgust to lust and love. Published in 1917, Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise is a frank portrayal of early twentieth-century America.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

David Graham Phillips (1867–1911) was murdered by a lunatic who thought that his family had been defamed in one of Phillips’ novels.

 

Elizabeth Janeway resides in New York City. Among her recent books is Man’s World, Woman’s Place.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Irvington Pub (October 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0829020381
• ISBN-13: 978-0829020380
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,665,889 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Should be added to the canon of the realistic novel, July 16, 2002

By 

Rebecca Ivie Scott "appalachian_film_buff" (Knoxville, TN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Susan Lenox: Her Fall & Rise (Muckrakers Series) (Paperback)

I first encountered Susan Lenox as she was personified by Garbo in an enjoyable but rather unbelievable film that is a hash of melodrama and Hollywood "meet cute" conventions. As another reviewer has noted, there's virtually no correlation between the film and the book. Nontheless, when I saw an old copy of the novel in a used book store something told me I had to have it. My nudge was correct; Susan Lenox is a bang-up, amazingly gritty early 20th century novel (1908 or so) about an illegitimate child raised as a total innocent in the "lady class" but destined to become an astonishingly self-aware and highly intelligent New York City street prostitute after she is driven from her small town. She learns by hard experience that working women of her times could not make a living on their own without a supporting family. I could not believe at times that I was not reading a fast-moving historical novel written by a modern feminist author. I repeatedly closed the book to look at the back-cover photograph of the stern young Victorian era author in wonder. He is very hard on sexist men and has an uncanny bead on women's inner lives, outer lives, and--how odd!--their relations with clothing (yes, throughout the ages we females have suffered from fabric dependencies and have drawn inordinate satisfaction from satisfying them--but as the author DGP is aware, PEOPLE ONLY KNOW WHAT THEY SEE, so one's clothing can be tragically important, out of all proportion, as far as how one is treated). Follow Susan from her first arousing crush, to her horrid marital rape the day and evening of her family-forced wedding, to her sweatshop and tenement days,and through her graft-paying, opium-smoking, hard-drinking street prostitue years--and on to, surprise!, success. But the muck-raking author makes it clear 100 that times Susan's "rise" is a fluke and unfairly impossible without a sponsoring male. It is a gripping read--much more so than the books of the "canonical" realistic authors of the era. From other books of DGP I found on-line after reading Susan Lenox, I found he was starry-eyed about Karl Marx--but, hey, cut him a break since DGP was murdered in 1911 by someone who took offense at one of his books and therefore was spared seeing what a horror the Russian revolution and communism unleashed upon the globe. In his day, the grinding of the faces of the poor under mega-capitalists' feet (robber barons--remember them from US History 101?) and colluding politicians (Boss Tweed ring a bell?) made socialism (then just a theory) seem a kinder, gentler alternative to the status quo. Under DGP's proper Victorian waistcoat beat the heart of a dis-illusioned idealist who obviously cared about the plight of the poor and about the crippling social conditioning of women. And the gent could really turn out page-turners! Enjoy an unjustly lost classic.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars over rated, September 19, 2010

By 

camille - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (Kindle Edition)

I was indeed impressed with this lady's moxy and self reliance. However, I was somewhat disappointed in the book as a whole. There was enough movement in the first half of the book to keep me reading, but the over descript pros made me weary. After a while I began to simply skim over the pages trying to find content. The story was powerful, but could have been told in one-forth of the pages.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Tedious beyond belief., February 15, 2011

By 

pbobb - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (Kindle Edition)

This was the most tedious story I've read in a very long while. I rarely begin a book and not finish it but after getting more than half way through this one I just couldn't continue. The story is bogged down in so much mindnumbing, repetitive detail, detail that adds nothing to the story except to make it unbelievably tiresome. The main character, Susan Lenox, makes the same ridiculous decisions over and over again with the same disastrous results. I found this story to be very unsatisfactory. I gave this story one star because I had no other choice, I couldn't give it no stars.