Soon to be a feature film from the creators of Downton Abbey
starring Elizabeth McGovern, The Chaperone is a New York
Times-bestselling novel about the woman who chaperoned an irreverent
Louise Brooks to New York City in the 1920s and the summer that would
change them both.
Only a few years before becoming a famous silent-film star and an icon
of her generation, a fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks leaves Wichita,
Kansas, to study with the prestigious Denishawn School of Dancing in New
York. Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a thirty-six-year-old
chaperone, who is neither mother nor friend. Cora Carlisle, a
complicated but traditional woman with her own reasons for making the
trip, has no idea what she's in for. Young Louise, already stunningly
beautiful and sporting her famous black bob with blunt bangs, is known
for her arrogance and her lack of respect for convention. Ultimately,
the five weeks they spend together will transform their lives forever.
For Cora, the city holds the promise of discovery that might answer the
question at the core of her being, and even as she does her best to
watch over Louise in this strange and bustling place she embarks on a
mission of her own. And while what she finds isn't what she anticipated,
she is liberated in a way she could not have imagined. Over the course
of Cora's relationship with Louise, her eyes are opened to the promise
of the twentieth century and a new understanding of the possibilities
for being fully alive.
Drawing on the rich history of the 1920s, '30s, and beyond--from the
orphan trains to Prohibition, flappers, and the onset of the Great
Depression to the burgeoning movement for equal rights and new
opportunities for women--Laura Moriarty's The Chaperone illustrates how
rapidly everything, from fashion and hemlines to values and attitudes,
was changing at this time and what a vast difference it all made for
Louise Brooks, Cora Carlisle, and others like them.
