Years of Grace
by Margaret Ayer Barnes
Summary
Jane Ward is fourteen in the Chicago of the 1890s when the novel opens, a bright, obedient daughter of the comfortable classes, in love with a boy named Andre who is bound for Paris and sculpture. Her parents wait the romance out, as parents in this world reliably do, and the book then gives Jane her whole life: Bryn Mawr cut short, a sensible marriage to Stephen Carver of the Boston Carvers, children, the war, and the slow accumulation of decades in which every real desire is met, considered, and declined.
The centre of the novel is the affair that does not happen. In her thirties Jane falls thoroughly in love with Jimmy, her friend's husband, and is loved back, and the entire force of her upbringing arrives to settle the question; the renunciation is presented as both her finest hour and a kind of quiet amputation, and Barnes is too honest to pretend the two are different things. The last movement hands the stage to Jane's grown children, who divorce, remarry and take their happiness where they find it, while Jane watches a moral world she paid full price for being casually dismantled by its beneficiaries.
It is a long, unhurried, furniture rich novel in the Galsworthy manner, and its pleasures are those of accumulation: forty years of clothes, streets, marriages and manners, all precisely dated.
Around six hundred pages.
Best for readers who like generational sagas with a genuine moral problem at the centre, and who can hear irony under a perfectly composed surface.
Historical Context & Significance
Years of Grace won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1931, and its author's road there is better than most plots. Margaret Ayer Barnes was a Chicago clubwoman of forty with no literary career at all when she broke her back in a car crash in 1926; her friend the playwright Edward Sheldon urged her to write while she healed. Within five years she had adapted The Age of Innocence for the stage, a nice omen given which novel opens this list's second Pulitzer decade, co written the hit play Dishonored Lady with Sheldon, published this bestseller and won the prize.
She wrote four more novels through the 1930s, Edna His Wife the best known, all in the same vein of upper middle class American life examined from inside, and then stopped. The books were bestsellers and are now nearly invisible, a fate she shares with most of this list's women; the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame inducted her in 2016, and Years of Grace survives as the panoramic Chicago novel of its generation.