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I’ve been in a sort of Margaret Widdemer, sheltered girl finally getting the adventure she’s been wanting mood, so I keep picking up her books, but You’re Only Young Once isn’t in that mold. Instead of a lone, lonely heroine, you have a family of them, plus some brothers, with loving parents in the background. Angela Goldsborough is the eldest, a doll-like singing teacher, one of two daughters who are contributing to the family income. Then Janetta is tall, dark and business-minded, Deborah is dreamy and beautiful, Annice is quiet and quaint, and Isabella is lively and spoiled. All of them are pretty, and none of them lacks male attention — the older sisters draw lots for the parlor in the evening, because all of them are always expecting callers. Each of them gets a romance over the course of the book, and so do two of their three brothers — warm-hearted John and steady, bespectacled Worrel.

With so many young people to dispose of, none of them get very much time. Sometimes that’s fine — I was satisfied with how much I got of Deborah and Isabella, who each had a few extra chapters, post-engagement, and Angela’s story was almost too abrupt to engage me at all. But I would happily have read a whole book about Annice, who comes up with a ridiculous plan that turns out better than she has any right to expect. Or Janetta, who might be my favorite, and who doesn’t allow her marriage to end her career in real estate. And John really only gets half his story told.

All of my complaints boil down to wanting more, though, and that’s barely a criticism.

Mel happened to be reading this one when I said I wanted a Cinderella book, and something that was like The Blue Castle but wasn’t The Blue Castle, and recommended it. And Margaret Widdemer’s The Year of Delight is very definitely both of those things, and if Margaret Widdemer can’t stop her characters from coercing each other into being married…well, it bothers me a lot less when the person being coerced is the man.

The title makes both more and less sense when you know that it’s the name of the title character. Delight Lanier is a dreamy, obedient child, brought up at a cross between a boarding school and an orphan asylum, and she grows up into a dreamy, obedient young woman, working as a secretary for a philanthropic cousin. She exist more in her daydreams, which take place in the year after next, than in her real life.

That changes when her cousin dies and leaves her six million dollars and she’s simultaneously diagnosed with pernicious anemia. She’s only got a year to live, so there isn’t any year-after-next anymore. But she’s got millions of dollars at her disposal, so she decides to start living in year-after-next now. She collects the girl she wanted as a best friend when she was a kid and hires her as her companion, does a lot of shopping, buys a house in the country, and gets up a house party with the man she hasn’t realized she’s in love with and his fiancée as its nucleus. And, with all that in place, she tries to be an ordinary young person, in a way she’s never gotten to be before.

She’s very good at it, of course. That’s the kernel of the whole Cinderella story thing: a heroine who’s out of the world in some way — whether because she’s poor, or sheltered, or a drudge or whatever — to the point where she doesn’t really know how to…do life, I guess. But then she gets fitted out with a nice set of worldly possessions and thrown in with a nice set of people, and finds out that actually she’s very good at doing life.

Margaret Widdemer has a pretty solid grasp on that concept — see The Rose Garden Husband, The Wishing-Ring Man, Why Not?, etc. Don’t see I’ve Married Marjorie, because it’s gross. And she executes it very well here: The Year of Delight is materialistic but light-hearted, and Widdemer understands the value of being pettily mean to the hero’s fiancée, and of having an extra man on hand to fall in love with the heroine. She’s also really good at convincing you that her characters really enjoy each other’s company, which is always a plus.

The Year of Delight is almost too much like The Wishing-Ring Man, without being quite as good. Delight’s love interest, Julian, was a little less attractive by the end than he was at the beginning, partly as a consequence of clinging to Edna, his fiancée, for a little too long, and while Widdemer tries to make Delight’s inconsistency seem more like a feature than a bug, it doesn’t quite work. Still, though, mostly it’s just super, super fun. I feel like Widdemer delights in the same kind of knotty emotional situation that I do, and sometimes I almost don’t dislike her for I’ve Married Marjorie.

There have been a lot of articles and blog posts floating around lately about what to read if you’re into Downton Abbey. One in particular, which talked about Elizabeth von Arnim apropos of one character giving a copy of Elizabeth and Her German Garden to another, made Evangeline at Edwardian Promenade say, “hey, what about Elinor Glyn?” Which, obviously, is the correct response to everything. And then I read it, and thought, “yeah, Elizabeth and her German Garden was popular when it came out in 1898, but would people really be trying to get each other to read a fifteen rear-old(ish) novel by a German author during World War I?” And then we decided that we could probably come up with an excellent list of Edwardian and World War I-era fiction that tied in the Downton Abbey. And so we did.

It’s a pretty casual list, mostly composed of things we came up with off the tops of out heads, a bit of research on Evangeline’s part and a bit of flipping through advertisements on mine, so we’re making no claims to be exhaustive. If you have suggestions for additions to the list, leave a comment.

So, that “he/she fell in love with his/her wife/ husband” trope I was talking about a couple of weeks ago? Margaret Widdemer seems to be at least as fond of it as I am. I’ve Married Marjorie is the third of her books that I’ve read, and the second one where the hero and heroine get married long before their happy ending. It’s not as straightforward an example of the trope as The Rose-Garden Husband, but I don’t think that’s the reason that the book isn’t quite successful.

I wasn’t this angry about the book when I was reading it — I do find it easy to let a book’s internal logic take me where it will, and there was all this interesting, half-heartedly psychological stuff that reminded me of Eleanor Hallowell Abbott — but the more I think about it now, the less I like it.

Widdemer does switch things up — I’ll give her that. For one thing, Marjorie Ellison is already married when the book begins. She married in haste — Francis Ellison basically badgered her into marrying him while he was on leave from the army — and is now repenting, although not quite at leisure. Francis is due home in a week or so, and Marjorie is not looking forward to seeing him.

Another thing that’s different: Francis was head over heels in love with Marjorie when they got married. He never stops being head over heels in love with her. It would be cute if he didn’t also have this thing where he never stops being kind of an asshole.

It’s an interesting situation: Francis and Marjorie know each other for a few weeks, get married, and then don’t see each other for a year. It makes sense that Marjorie isn’t in love with him. I liked that she wasn’t, and that she had a job and a social life and has a tame intellectual who trails after her.  I…didn’t like much else.

Francis decides that the best way to deal with the situation is to kidnap Marjorie and carry her to Canada, where he has a job reforesting.  (Marjorie “did
not quite know how people reforested, but she had a vague image in her
mind of people going along with armfuls of trees which they stuck in
holes.”)

Now, I don’t usually have much trouble getting into the right mindset to enjoy early 20th century romance novels. I mean, I finished The Sheik. But I found I’ve Married Marjorie really troubling. Not that I didn’t find The Sheik extremely troubling, it’s just…you expect that from E.M. Hull, you know? But not from Margaret Widdemer.

Francis and Marjorie are married. Francis knows that Marjorie isn’t in love with him. She offered to try and make their marriage work anyway and he was nasty to her. It has been pretty much decided that they’re going to get divorced.

But then Francis changes his mind, and after making a half-hearted attempt to talk to the still angry Marjorie, he enlists her cousin/roommate Lucille’s help and kidnaps her.

Can we go over that once more? Instead of giving her a few days to cool down, he decides that carrying Marjorie off to Canada without asking is a better idea. And she has a life, and a job, and it’s less than 48 hours since the first time they’ve seen each other in a year.

This makes me completely furious.

And then there’s Lucille. She’s Marjorie’s cousin. They live together. Lucille has known Francis no longer than Marjorie has. And yet she thinks it’s okay to help Francis abduct his wife. Lucille isn’t the most down to earth char

I finally followed a long-ago recommendation from Redeeming Qualities reader Elizabeth and read The Rose-Garden Husband, by Margaret Widdemer. And I love it. It’s so completely up my alley that it’s hard to believe it’s real. Phyllis Braithwaite is 25, and has been working in a city library for seven years. She’s moved through a couple [...]