Early Autumn
by Louis Bromfield
Summary
The Pentlands are the oldest money north of Boston, a family so long established that its fortune, its house and its legend have replaced anything resembling life. Into this comes the novel's one open window: Olivia, married twenty years to the heir Anson Pentland, a bloodless man at eternal work on a family history nobody will read. Olivia runs the house, manages her father in law John Pentland's grief, guards a mad old woman in the north wing, and has arrived, in her early forties, at the season the title names.
Over one summer the structure is tested everywhere at once. Olivia's daughter Sybil is courted by a Frenchman the family finds unsuitable; her dying son carries the Pentland name's last hopes; her Irish American neighbour O'Hara, a self made politician, offers her the one honest passion of her adult life; and her husband's cousin Sabine, returned rich and amused from Europe, works at the family façade like a woman picking a lock, because she knows what is inside. What is inside, when the papers are finally read, is the book's quiet bomb: the Pentland legend itself is founded on a stolen name, its founder a bastard child, and the purity everyone has sacrificed to is an heirloom forgery.
Whether Olivia takes her chance or keeps the house standing is the last question, and Bromfield answers it like the period he wrote in.
Around three hundred and fifty pages, smooth, atmospheric and old fashioned in the pleasurable sense.
Best for readers who want the New England house novel between Wharton and du Maurier, with the family secret earning its keep.
Historical Context & Significance
Early Autumn won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1927. Louis Bromfield wrote it in France, where he had settled in 1925 and produced the run of novels, The Green Bay Tree, Possession, this book and A Good Woman, that made him one of the most popular serious novelists of the decade; The Rains Came, his India bestseller, followed in 1937. Nearly everything he wrote sold enormously and much of it was filmed.
The second act is the one people remember. In 1939 he came home to Ohio, bought worn out land near Mansfield and built Malabar Farm, where he became the most famous farmer in America, an evangelist for soil conservation and what is now called sustainable agriculture, entertaining politicians and film stars in his farmhouse; Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were married there in 1945 with Bromfield as best man.
The farming books outlived the fiction. The novels, this one included, fell from the canon with unusual speed, and Malabar, now an Ohio state park, is his monument.