LOVER OR FRIEND.....A NOVEL FOR GIRLS OR WOMEN. DON'T LET THE TITLE FOOL YOU....IT IS A "SAFE FICTION" NOVEL! CHECK THE DESCRIPTION BELOW. 330 PAGES IN PRINT.
• This volume includes a “Detailed Biography” of our author, Rosa Nouchette Carey.
This novel is a prime example of "safe fiction" for girls of the 19th century, which is to say highly conservative with an emphasis on the domestic duties of women, which take precedence over all other considerations and responsibilities.
A very popular novelist in her time but now long forgotten, Rosa Nouchette Carey's ambition was "to try to do good and not harm by my works, and to write books which any mother can give a girl to read" (as cited by Black, Notable Women Authors). As such, the question Lover or Friend? - a suggestive title suggesting more than it delivers - aims at the latter, safely navigating the young female reader away from potential indelicacies to rest ashore a pure land not without its own difficulties, and it is there that the book still speaks to women stepping into the modern world yet fettered to the old, and frustrated. Juggling the roles of wife, mother, and working woman remains as much a daily struggle for women in 2011 as it was in 1890, though Carey's answer, concentrate on the domestic front, retreat from the other, may rankle 21st century feminists.
Carey practiced what she preached. Though she enjoyed writing, she kept it a friend, not a lover.
"I do not think that I have known any author who has made her writing - the real work of her life - so secondary a matter as has Rosa Carey. She has so consistently lived her religion, so to speak, that family duty and devotion to its many members have always come first" (Helen Marion Burnside, as cited by Black).
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