Ladies Must Live (1917) is a novel by Alice Duer Miller. Inspired by her work as an activist for women’s rights, Miller presents a romantic comedy exploring the effects of class and gender on love, friendship, and work. Adapted for theater and film, Ladies Must Live is a charming novel from a writer whose reputation as a popular poet should extend to her fiction as well. “Certain human beings are admitted to have a genius for discrimination in such matters as objects of art, pigs or stocks. Mrs. Ussher had this same instinct in regard to fashion, especially where fashions in people were concerned. She turned toward hidden social availability very much as the douser’s hazel wand turns toward the hidden spring. When she crossed the room to speak to some woman after dinner, whatever that woman’s social position might formerly have been, you could be sure that at present she was on the upward wing.” At a gathering of prominent socialites, a story of ambition and romance emerges. While Christine longs to marry the soon-to-be-divorced Ralph, she finds herself in competition with Nancy, a woman she detests. As the night goes on, discussions over wealth, women’s rights, and politics turn heated, engagements are made and broken, and a tragic event changes hearts and minds forever. Ladies Must Live is both a romantic comedy and a biting critique on social convention from Alice Duer Miller, whose political work as a women’s rights activist informs her characters and their frequently contentious interactions. This edition of Alice Duer Miller’s Ladies Must Live is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.
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About the author
Alice Duer Miller (1874-1942) was an American novelist, poet, screenwriter, and women’s rights activist. Born into wealth in New York City, she was raised in a family of politicians, businessmen, and academics. At Barnard College, she studied Astronomy and Mathematics while writing novels, essays, and poems. She married Henry Wise Miller in 1899, moving with him in their young son to Costa Rica where they struggled and failed to open a rubber plantation. Back in New York, Miller earned a reputation as a gifted poet whose satirical poems advocating for women’s suffrage were collected in Are Women People? (1915). Over the next two decades, Miller published several collections of stories and poems, some of which would serve as source material for motion picture adaptations. The White Cliffs (1940), her final published work, is a verse novel that uses the story of a young women widowed during the Great War to pose important questions about the morality of conflict and patriotism in the leadup to the United States’ entrance into World War II.
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