A provocative story of class struggle, privilege, and poverty that put
American author Jean Stafford on the map.
Growing up in a fishing village north of Boston between the wars, Sonie,
the child of immigrants, is so poor that she must "sleep on a pallet
made of old coats and comforters." She can only dream of the feather
beds and perfumed soap to be found in the great city across the bay. In
the summers, while helping her mother clean rooms in a shoreside hotel,
she keeps company with the austere and fascinating Miss Pride. Years
pass, and Sonie--now the caretaker of her fragile mother--receives an
invitation from Miss Pride to move to Beacon Hill and be her personal
secretary. Salvation, she thinks, is at hand. In Boston, Sonie does come
to know a new and broader world, one in which she mingles with both blue
bloods and louche European refugees, and yet her troubles, she
discovers, are hardly over.
Boston Adventure was published when Jean Stafford was twenty-nine, and
it was an immediate best seller. Combining Dickensian color and
Proustian insight in its depiction of an isolated but determined young
woman, it looks forward to Stafford's celebrated novel The Mountain
Lion as well as to the short stories for which she would be awarded a
Pulitzer Prize in 1970.
