The Real Adventure by Henry Kitchell Webster

Description

The Real Adventure is the story of a woman who discovers that marriage, as it is handed to a young American bride, is not the whole of her life — and sets out to see for herself. Henry Kitchell Webster’s 1916 novel follows Rose from the safe, admiring comfort of a new Chicago household into the working world of the theatre, where she must earn everything she has been given for nothing. Its chapter titles — “The Tune Changes,” “A Broken Parallel,” “Friends,” “The Beginning” — compose a score for a life being rewritten in public.

Webster writes with the psychological care of the realist tradition and the forward march of the popular novel. His interest is less in the suffocating villainy of a bad marriage than in the subtler question of a good one whose equilibrium has been bought at the price of one partner’s agency. Rose’s flight is not revenge; it is education, and the novel follows her through boardwalks of failure, near-humiliation, and small, hard-won successes until the woman at the end is recognizably the girl at the beginning and entirely different.

Written when the New Woman was remaking American fiction, The Real Adventure stands out for its fairness to both parties and its refusal to reduce its heroine to a cause. It is a novel of character first, a portrait of the theatre second, and a document of its age always.

Why readers pick it up

• A nuanced, unstereotyped portrait of a woman making her own way.
• Fascinating backstage detail of the American theatre in its golden age.
• A thought-provoking companion to the feminist fiction of its decade.

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.