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Chargement... Roast Beef, Medium: The Business Adventures of Emma McChesneypar Edna Ferber
Books Read in 2017 (1,992) Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Reminiscent of an old Hollywood movie, Emma McChesney is a fast-talking travelling petticoat sales"man". She is divorced and plans to put her teenage son through college with her earnings. Being mindful of the risks involved in competing with male sales reps has not made her become hardened or any less professional. Still, she knows what to expect in a restaurant pie or stew and stays with the reliable "roast beef, medium". Written in 1913, Ferber gives the reader an idea of what life was like for business women in the early 20th century. Savvy, straight-talking, and self-reliant, Emma McChesney, is as witty and entertaining as the “fast-talking dames” found in old movies, but it’s closer to 1910 than 1930 or 40. Emma’s an early career woman, working as the Midwest sales representative for T.A. Buck’s Featherloom skirts and petticoats, and most of her life is spent on the road--traveling by train, sleeping in hotels, meeting the most interesting people, and outsmarting the male sales reps who are her competition. She’s still stylish and attractive enough to make a man hope, but as a hardworking divorced mother dependant on her income she’s a stickler about her reputation. Roast Beef Medium is the first of three books about the adventures of Emma McChesney. Edna Ferber, also the author of Giant and Show Boat, wrote the McChesney books long enough ago that they’re all in the public domain and ebook copies of them can be downloaded from sites like Project Gutenberg. I listened to a wonderfully narrated Libravox recording, also free, which kept me grinning even when stuck in traffic. Emma McChesney, the heroine of Roast beef, medium is a single mother with a teenaged son who makes her living as a travelling saleswoman. Despite a professed longing for a home life, she is a business woman to her fingers and she progresses despite the difficulties of the road--bad food and conditions, illness and the competition, which is occasionally malicious and conniving. Emma has a hearty, Girl-Scoutish tone and you can almost imagine her being played by Ginger Rogers or Jean Arthur in one of those Thirties comedies. The story was fun and it's interesting to see that the life of the working mother doesn't change much. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
Appartient à la sérieEmma McChesney (Book 1)
Edna Ferber, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Show Boat and Giant, achieved her first great success with a series of stories she published in American Magazine between 1911 and 1913. The stories featured Emma McChesney: smart, savvy, stylish, divorced mother, and Midwest traveling sales representative for T. A. Buck's Featherloom skirts and petticoats. With one hand on her sample case and the other fending off advances from salesmen, hotel clerks, and other predators, Emma holds on tightly to her reputation: honest, hardworking, and able to outsell the slickest salesman. Like her compact bag of traveling necessities, Emma has her life boiled down to essentials: her work and her seventeen-year-old son, Jock. Her experience has taught her that it's best to stick to roast beef, medium - avoiding both physical and moral indigestion - rather than experiment with fancy sauces and exotic dishes. Yet she never shies away from a challenge, and her sharp instincts and common sense serve her well in dealing with the likes of Ed Meyer, a smooth-talking, piano-playing salesman; Blanche LeHay, prima donna of the Sam Levin Crackerjack Belles; and T. A. Buck Jr., the wet-behind-the-ears son of and trials of Emma McChesney. The illustrations by James Montgomery Flagg, one of the most highly regarded book illustrators of the period, enhance both the humor and the vivid characterization in this wise and high-spirited tale. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813.52Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1900-1944Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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I cannot tell if Edna Thurber really believed that housewifery and marriage were the only things that could fulfill a woman, or if she felt (perhaps rightly) that it was obligatory to throw that kind of sentiment over a book that’s about a strong single woman with a career. Reading this book was actually a bit painful because of the unending sexual harrassment Emma faced. It was of a very sanitized “let me take you out to dinner because you’re so beautiful” kind, but I still found it upsetting. Weirdly, this book reminded me of the Lad: A Dog series by Albert Payson Terhune because they both have the same thing happening over and over: Lad/Emma meets someone who is prejudiced against him/her, but then Lad/Emma proves him/herself through incredible heroism and nobleness, and the person realizes how wonderful s/he is. Couldn’t Emma just once meet someone who didn’t make all kinds of assumptions about her, and why did she have to educate these sleazebags over and over? It was just depressing, but I think hyper-realistic.
Here’s a description of Emma and her best friend. “Theirs was not a talking friendship. It was a thing of depth and understanding, like the friendship between two men.” Hate yourself much? But then, “They sat looking into each other’s eyes, and down beyond, where the soul holds forth. And because what each saw there was beautiful and sightly they were seized with shyness such as two men feel when they love each other, so they awkwardly endeavored to cover up their shyness with words.” Oh, I see, so it’s like that kind of friendship between men.
I looked at Edna Ferber’s Wikipedia page and it seems a lot of people think she was gay, but there’s no evidence she ever had a romantic or sexual relationship with anyone, so a lot of other people think there’s no basis for that assumption. I am equally compelled by both points of view, especially based on the passage above. On the one hand, it seems obvious that a woman who never had any attachment with a man was a lesbian and just kept it on the DL; practically everyone I know is gay so why not Edna Ferber? On the other hand, maybe she was ace and just wanted to gaze into someone’s eyes, but people can’t conceive of that as possible so they are unfairly stuffing her into the gay category. Either way, Edna Ferber was not your average bear, and this book reads as very “coded” but I can’t quite crack the code. ( )