The Duchess of Angus
Published on 23. March 2020
273 pages
978-1-59534-908-8 (ISBN)
Description
Written in the 1950s and discovered by family members years after her death, Margaret Brown Kilik's shocking coming-of-age novel of the emotional and sexual brutality of young women's lives in wartime San Antonio deserves a place on the shelf alongside classic novels like Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding.
The Duchess of Angus reworks Kilik's unusual personal history (her mother spent the 1930s running flophouse hotels all over the United States, leaving Margaret to be brought up by a host of relatives) into a riveting portrait of a young woman navigating a conflicted and rapidly changing world, one in which sex promises both freedom from convention and violent subjection to men's will. Strikingly modern in its depiction of protagonist Jane Davis and her gorgeous, unreadable friend Wade Howell, The Duchess of Angus covers some of the same emotional territory as novels like Emma Cline's The Girls and Robyn Wasserman's Girls on Fire.
Includes an introduction by Jenny Davidson and contextual essays by Laura Hernández-Ehrisma and Char Miller.
The Duchess of Angus reworks Kilik's unusual personal history (her mother spent the 1930s running flophouse hotels all over the United States, leaving Margaret to be brought up by a host of relatives) into a riveting portrait of a young woman navigating a conflicted and rapidly changing world, one in which sex promises both freedom from convention and violent subjection to men's will. Strikingly modern in its depiction of protagonist Jane Davis and her gorgeous, unreadable friend Wade Howell, The Duchess of Angus covers some of the same emotional territory as novels like Emma Cline's The Girls and Robyn Wasserman's Girls on Fire.
Includes an introduction by Jenny Davidson and contextual essays by Laura Hernández-Ehrisma and Char Miller.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
San Antonio
United States
Illustrations
Maps
File size
4,22 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-59534-908-8 (9781595349088)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Margaret Brown Kilik was raised by a single mother, and they moved frequently throughout the country during her childhood. Kilik graduated from the University of Toledo with a degree in English and subsequently lived in San Antonio, where she renewed a relationship with Eugene Kilik, whom she married. They spent the majority of their lives in New York City, where Kilik established and ran the Key Gallery in Soho. She was a collage artist and writer, and her only novel, The Duchess of Angus, written in the early 1950s, was discovered after her death. She died in New York in 2001.
Content
- Intro
- The Discovery: Margaret Brown Kilik's The Duchess of Angus, by Jenny Davidson
- The Duchess of Angus, by Margaret Brown Kilik
- Streetwise, by Char Miller
- Beyond Adobe Walls: Anglo Perceptions and the Social Realities of San Antonio's "Mexican Quarter," by Laura Hernandez-Ehrisman
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
