Ex-Wife

It’s 1925. Crunched between the Victorian age, WWI, and the Great Depression, women have new freedoms in the Roaring 20s, but do they? Patricia’s husband wants a divorce. She’s still in love with him, but the relationship has turned toxic. Separated from Peter, she’s free to explore her new identity as a businesswoman in her 20s, single again and living in New York City. According to her friend Lucia, women are “Free to pay our own rent, and buy our own clothes, and put up with the eccentricities of three to eight men who have authority over us in business, instead of having to please just one husband.” Can she survive being an Ex-Wife?

Published anonymously as part of a marketing gimmick, which drew attention to the scandalous writing, this sensational book sold over 100,000 copies in its first year. The novel explores difficult topics (divorce, abortion, rape, casual sex) via a rare lens - a 1920’s female perspective. Aside from the physical setting of telephones and rotogravures, the emotional tug-of-war for Patricia is just as easy to perceive today as it was almost a century ago.