Wife For Sale

[dj from A. L. Burt edition, listed on Amazon] [description from leaf before title page in my 1933 A L Burt copy]

Life looked bleak to pretty Norah Oliver with her widowed mother seriously ill, her brother and herself out of jobs -- only her sister's meager salary keeping the little family from starvation.

If only David would marry her, how grand things would be -- but David had been strangely indifferent of late.

And then Norah hit upon the fantastic idea of advertising herself as a "wife for sale"...

Life changed quickly to an exciting whirl when Barry Dunsmuir answered her ad.

Norah's daring adventure makes a fascinating story of love and its strange ways with a girl and the two men who worshiped her.

Kathleen Norris, though largely forgotten now, was, per Wikipedia, "one of the most widely read and highest paid female writers in the United States for nearly fifty years, from 1911 to 1959". California-born, a devout Catholic, active in causes ranging from suffragism to social welfare to pacifism. And if you've read any Kathleen Norris you know that, as successful vintage writers go, also bit bonkers. A more restrained and respectable bonkers than, say, Louise Gerard, but nonetheless, you never know what you're going to get when you crack open a new Norris (and there are 93 of them). While her themes and concerns are pretty consistent, the rest is anything but & everything goes. Take Barry Dunsmuir, for instance. How does she describe him?

• "A small dark scowling man, pale, and heavily spectacled" (46)
• "sick-looking, eye-glassed, grinning" (46)
• "..elfin. He was rather like a satyr -- or Pan -- or a hobgoblin." (47)
• "..with his unearthly grimace and chuckle...His laugh was simply ghoulish" (52)
• "high imperious voice...gnomelike eyes" (104)

Honestly, I've not encountered a single other vintage writer who exceeds, in guts, pairing her female main character with "a spectacled, cackling little man...her senior by almost eleven years." (53) And this including Louise G.'s strange young men and Ethel D's Greatheart and Saltash.

The premise of Wife for Sale is that it's the Depression, Norah's brother's lost his $45 a week job, she's lost her $22, dad's recently died, mom's sick, little sister only makes $16, and the rent on their dingy apartment in the Bronx is more than that. Norah doesn't love her clerical work, anyhow -- "to breathe office air, scented with radiator pipes, typewriter oil, and pencil dust..." (23), to be "a stupid cog in a stupid machine" -- so when she struggles to find a new position, she decides to beat an entirely different -- more venerable -- tack: marrying for money. She places an ad in the paper, offering, in exchange an annuity for her mom ($20k), a marriage in which she'll try her best to provide her husband/purchaser with "a good home, children, friends, and my lifelong devotion." (28) Barry answers -- "why not try Princeton and Oxford?" (41). He's bonafide, looking for a wife to chatelaine the country home he's just inherited, and, he claims, interested in proving "marriage can be made rationally, like other contracts". (108) He also cackles, and is a chauvinist, which weighs against the Princeton and Oxford. But desperation wins out, Norah agrees, and is soon installed at Foxaway Farm (Northern New Jersey) while Barry leaves from their secret wedding for (because Kathleen Norris) a 6 month polar expedition with the great explorer Fred Sassoon. And here's where the book actually starts to work. It's billed as a romance -- all of Norris's are -- but with the men out of the picture, it gets down to what the story really is: a fantasy about a woman escaping from the urban rat race and finding the space and opportunity to create a meaningful, independent, self-sufficient life. A life with "background, occupation, significance" (232). Norah takes to the farm immediately -- she sees how with creativity and hard work, it can provide her a "rich and busy livelihood", and all the hustles she comes up with -- make jam, take in children, board livestock, offer country dinners for travelers -- feel unexpectedly contemporary. She grows in confidence, competence, and self-respect, and it's a journey worth following her on. There's more kookiness to come (spoiler alert: the "Ladysmith" lost at sea) and a rich college boy to stir things up, but there's growth in more character than one and Norris picks up the threads of romance in the last few chapters in a way that's, surprisingly, kind of effective (and affecting).

The closest I've read, thematically, to Wife for Sale, is Margaret Widdemer's Eve's Orchard. I might actually like this one better.

Flags: One use of a racial slur, not directed at any individual.