A Well Behaved Woman by Therese Anne Fowler

★★★

I am more conflicted writing this review than any review in recent memory. I enjoy historical fiction. I enjoy strong women. I love listening to a story sometimes as opposed to reading. It can add a whole extra layer of pleasure. I found the book to be well paced and the prose to be good. A Well Behaved Woman has all of those qualities but where Ms. Fowler has imagined conversations and details the book becomes flawed and at times outright offensive. 

In the first few chapters, then Alva Smith is portrayed as the only compassionate girl among her peers, offering assistance to tenement dwellers while her classmates carp about having to be exposed to the lower classes. In this scene, even the tenement girl Alva is assisting is portrayed as rude for declining money offered after the death of her sister. That scene is referenced three or four more times throughout the book turning on the phrase "money's no help." Each time it's referenced it is used to illustrate how correct Alva is. Yet throughout those same early chapters, Alva's internal dialogue is so self-pitying one wants to shake her. Her family has lost their fortune (more on that in a minute) and she frets they will be destitute, living in tenements themselves "taking in wash" as she puts it again and again. No. No you wouldn't. There is a vast difference between being born into poverty in the nineteenth century and taking several steps down the social ladder after selling off the family property and assets. Alva has historically been portrayed as hard, difficult, domineering. If these early chapters were the authors attempt to counter that reputation and make Alva more likable they had quite the opposite effect for me.  

Then there is the slavery issue. While I found Alva irritating in her self-pitying, I found her downright offensive on the issue of slavery and emancipated slaves. She laments the loss of the family fortune, glossing over the fact that the fortune was human. The Smiths were from Alabama and were cotton traders. Alva's father moved the family around between New York and Europe immediately prior to and during the civil war. In Ms. Fowler's telling she creates a composite character, "Mary," whom she casts as the daughter of the Smith family house slave. Alva has numerous discussions with Mary where they converse as equals, Alva asking Mary's opinion on which dress to wear or what her beliefs are on a social topic. At one point Alva asks Mary, "You never felt owned, did you?" Wow. I almost stopped listening there. 

What kept me engaged is that I did want to learn more about Alva. By that point I had done a cursory Google search and discovered that she was instrumental in the suffrage movement. I wanted to reconcile this mewling girl with a woman of courage. I'm glad a continued because there are some gems from the middle of the book to the end. 

Alva does go on to cleverly manipulate New York society to her advantage. More impressively, she not only commissions the building of homes and churches, she becomes proficient at design and architecture, something unheard of for a woman in that era. She not only participated in charities as many women of her class did, she took direct actions to assist the poor, rather than indirect contributions. All of this in addition to her suffrage efforts in her later life. 

If I were reading a work of fiction, I would label this as poorly executed character development, a flawed attempt to show growth in a character over the course of the novel. It is not fiction though and so, if the early portrayal is accurate, Ms. Fowler was faced with a difficult subject. Surely there must have been some better way to show us the totality of Alva Vanderbilt and leave us with someone to care about. Or, if she was truly that unlikable, deal with that fact head on. Find a way to show us that here is this unlikable human and here is why we are still interested in her. 

Three stars for this book and my thanks to Goodreads for the giveaway.