Miss Million's Maid

[from inner flap, Dodd Mead dj]

A high-spirited girl of twenty-three, pretty, well-bred, but penniless, tired of belonging to the class of the "come-downs" and of having neither the advantages of being rich nor the fun of being poor, flies in the face of tradition, and dons cap and apron in the service of Miss Million, a young heiress who has little notion of how to spend her vast fortune. The fun of looking after this little dollar princess lends new zest to life, but in heading off Miss Million's fortune-hunting suitors, Miss Lovelace herself falls for the absurdly blue eyes of an incorrigible Irishman, and so entangled grow the love stories of mistress and maid that the reader has a merry time with this clever author in steering the girls on the road to happiness.

Let's get this out up front: Miss Million's Maid includes several passages of anti-semitism. Two German Jewish characters, a couple, are negatively portrayed and, at the end, chucked into a western concentration camp for the duration of the war. Which war? WWI. This is where an extra strangeness enters the picture. The implication about the couple is that their distasteful behavior is a cultural consequence of both their Jewishness AND their Germanness. They are the only German characters in the book and, with every present-day reader's mind scrolling decades & horrors to come, having a Jewish couple represent that country, in its enemy status with the West, feels especially painful.

It's a shame, because, otherwise, the book is an interesting and entertaining look at class, at the 'plight' of the nouveau pauvre, at the sexism inherent in typical "nice" young men's protectiveness ("the man who shows his respect for women by refusing to let his own sisters see or do anything except, say, the darning of his own socks" (142)) -- at the whole usual Berta range of stuff. My favorite part of the book is actually not the romance (which is fine -- who doesn't love an Irish rogue?) but the female solidary shown by the actresses and artists of "The Refuge", who band together to provide the social safety net their profession (and their society) lacks. Ruck makes it clear that the real hero of Miss Million's is the big-hearted, clear-eyed, straight-talking music-hall star Miss Vi Vassity. If you like Ruck, and if you can get past the aforementioned unfortunate characterizations, you'll enjoy making her acquaintance!