Lucky In Love

[dust jacket flap] This charming story concerns the adventures of Mary Louise Threadgold and these adventures are within twenty-four hours, most of them twelve. Miss Threadgold is employed in a beauty shop. A boarding house companion needs money, and that very badly.

The Beauty Girl, as she is called by an aristocratic young woman, for whom she doubles, volunteers to sell a patch case that once belonged to Marie Antoinette, and takes it with her to work. This relic is supposedly a lucky talisman in love, and from the time the girl leaves her house carrying it, things happen fast, once they start, and they end only with a marriage definitely settled, where a day before it never had been suspected.

A young society woman sends for Miss Threadgold and induces her to double for her at a mask ball. Some are deceived by the substitution, others not. Anyway, the story from there becomes exciting and its development so rapid that the reader begrudges the double-named young woman the few hours sleep she gets during that eventful night.

Sometimes, in the middle of a vintage book, you're hit with the sudden melancholy of realizing how far, and ever farther, in time, the reader of today is from the world of the author and its young characters. Maybe it's the rain, which won't stop this winter, but Miss Mary Louise Threadgold, "playing, as it were, 'Cinderella, Nineteen Twenty-Three'" (252) really did it for me. "'All men must die' - but looking at a man like Celia's cousin Rufus, one repeats the phrase and finds it impossible to consider it anything but a phrase. So alive was he, so forceful. He was Vitality incarnate. Every other man might have to die, to grow old, or, quite possibly, both; *but not this man. *" (255) And yet tall, slim, laughing, redheaded Rufus -- "France one year, Germany three years, was what I saw of The Entertainment" (78) -- was a WWI vet and even his long-lived (centenarian!) creator has been gone 45 years this summer.

Lucky In Love is very much early Berta. "Light as down" (Oakland Tribune, Mar 22, 1925) and reliant on preposterous levels of coincidence and a remarkable degree of credulity (and inability to sum 2 and 2) on the part of her young, female, first-person narrator, it nevertheless manages to charm. That inimitable adjective-forward style, for one: "Furious it made me!" (95), "Desperately ashamed of myself I felt now." (110), and all her heroine's internal exclamations: "Sidelights on Celia!" (98). Add to this, her genuinely funny descriptions -- the alpha male made ridiculous by his Brothers Capek "Fighting Ant" costume (54), the young maid approaching with "the demure expression of a child who is secretly sucking sweets" (200). A contemporary review puts it bluntly: "Berta Ruck's sentiment would be terrible were it not for the saving grace of her humor." (Cincinnati Enquirer, Mar 1, 1925))

It's more than just that, though. Ruck always has interesting things to say about gender, class, and their intersection. The difficulties and vulnerabilities of young women "what have got to work" (10) get special emphasis in "Lucky" as Mary Louise struggles with her commute, her job, and her pinched boarding house life, and watches the women around her do the same -- in, sometimes, more difficult circumstances (young mothers). Ruck does a good job of capturing their fatigue and constant sense of financial insecurity. Sexism and sexual harassment add another dimension -- Mary Louise embarks on her mad adventure so her debted friend doesn't have to sell herself to an older married man. Wealthier women, the "women of leisure" who fill the chairs in the Aphrodite beauty salon -- sidelights on '23! -- come under criticism for the way they treat other women not of their perceived status, but Ruck is understanding of the pressures they face to maintain their attractiveness, the source of their self-worth, and their desperation about growing old. Ultimately, her heroines realize that women's interests and sympathies transcend class in a system that so favors men: "What a world for girls, as Miss Davis said -- even for girls who haven't 'got to work'!" (31)

Like many of Ruck's female main characters, Mary Louise has no use for men or romance -- Rufus's comment "On the whole you are not fond of men." could sum up a lot of Ruck girls -- until she finds the finds the right one. In this case, a man whose progressive politics have been shaped in the easy camaraderie between classes that he experienced in the military. Ruck strongly believed, at least in the interwar years, that the equalizing effect of sharing trench hardships would ultimately transform British society into a fairer, healthier place.

Ruck often introduces concepts outside the main storyline she's been clearly thinking about, and here it's the pretty, and, again, rather melancholy idea of the "near love": "the man or woman who might have been the true love but for accidental trifling circumstances" (132), such as age or life situation. Anyone who has had a vintage fictional crush will certainly grok this one.

Also, a line worth framing: "The sad truth is, that the troubles of this world are never those one has anticipated. Generally they are something far more awkward." (111) Words to endure by!

Flags: The usual scattered insensitive racial references. There is also a character who is described as extremely overweight (by over 200 lbs) and, while Ruck's point about him is more nuanced, her language is hurtful.