Synopses & Reviews
Elsie Lindtner is a woman at the "dangerous age" of forty-two in a society that values women only as marriageable items. After twenty-two years of comfortable but loveless marriage, Elsie divorces her husband and goes off to live alone on an island. But little by little her longing for solitude is tempered by the realities of loneliness and sexual deprivation.
First published in 1910 to raves and outrage, selling over a million copies and inspiring three films, The Dangerous Age created a sensation. Its author was, according to the New York Times, "simply the most talked of personality in Europe," and in time she inspired Colette, and befriended Bertolt Brecht and other artists fleeing the Nazi. Eighty years later, Karin Michaëlis's lost masterpiece remains as timely and compelling as the day it was written.
Review
"A small tour de force." --
Los Angeles TimesReview
"
The Dangerous Age is not simple in its feminism. Amid attractions to same-sex love and to solitude, persists a yearning for marriage and heterosexual passion—which Micahelis repeatedly subverts. She is too serious to be 'politically correct.' Michaelis manages to create an immediate, yet inescapable voice whose intelligence is mingled with self-deception in ways that instruct the mind, wrench the heart, and compel the spirit."
—William Veeder, University of Chicago
Synopsis
Elsie Lindtner is a woman at the "dangerous age" of forty-two in a society that values women only as marriageable items. After twenty-two years of comfortable but loveless marriage, Elsie divorces her husband and goes off to live alone on an island. But little by little her longing for solitude is tempered by the realities of loneliness and sexual deprivation.
About the Author
Karin Michaëlis (1872-1950) was a celebrated novelist, short-story writer, and author of a widely translated 1930s series of children's books with the eponymous heroine, Bibi.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Phillis Lassner
The Dangerous Age