The Gay Cockade by Temple Bailey

Description

Temple Bailey was for three decades one of the most-read romantic writers in America — the author whose serials the magazines sought first and whose novels the bookshops sold out — and The Gay Cockade shows the qualities that made her beloved. Its title story opens in a tired, gray government office, where a young man named Jimmie Harding walks in and changes the weather of everyone’s day, carrying “his youth like a gay cockade.” Bailey’s subject is that flare of spirit against the exhaustion of ordinary life, and she pursues it through a sequence of stories and character studies set largely in Washington — official Washington and the human Washington behind it.

The collection is gentle, funny, and sharply observant. Bailey writes about courtship with unforced sympathy, about office life with insider amusement, and about loneliness with a compassion that never turns mawkish. Her young women are sensible and spirited; her young men charmingly imperfect; her middle-aged characters tired but not defeated. The cumulative effect is the sense of a warm, sane intelligence arranging the world a little more kindly than it usually arranges itself.

For readers who know Bailey only by reputation, The Gay Cockade is the ideal entrance: a book that explains the enormous popularity of its author better than any biography could, and that still delivers its quiet, classic satisfactions unchanged.

Why readers pick it up

• The characteristic voice of a beloved American romanticist, at her most winning.
• Sharp, affectionate portraits of government Washington and its human side.
• Interlinked stories that read as a continuous, satisfying novel.

About this DodaBooks edition

This edition brings you the complete text with clean professional typesetting, a working table of contents, and chapter navigation optimized for phone, tablet, and e-reader.