Those Harper Women by Stephen Birmingham (1964)

Those Harper Women
by Stephen Birmingham
Publisher:  McGraw-Hill Book Company
Copyright:  1964
Book Club Edition

"Money.  It towered over all their lives.  It governs the present just as it controlled the past . . ."

The money, and Meredith Harper, the man who made it, made all of them what they were.

First there was Dolly, Meredith Harper's wife, whose life was an extended compromise -- with her husband, her servants, her child -- and who thought that money should have bought her a place in society.

Then there was Edith, Meredith's daughter, whom he brutalized, and made more like him than she would ever dare to admit.

Next came Edith's daughter, Diana, whom the money made cold and hard and strong.

And then, a generation later, came Leona -- beautiful and erratic -- who raced through three marriages, three divorces, and a final desperate and demeaning love affair, trying to escape the money's terrible weight.

Moving fuguelike through time, Stephen Birmingham's novel traces the torturous paths of these four generations of Harper women -- the threads of family and wealth that bind them all together, the shared secrets and scandals that threaten to fling them all apart -- while over the story hangs the threat of ruin and disaster and -- the final "impossible" thing -- an end to all the money.  Set in the tropic island of St. Thomas where the original fortune was made, peopled with memorable characters from the present and the past, Those Harper Women is a stirring and suspenseful narrative.

Sugar was an ailing industry even at the turn of the century, when Meredith Harper accepted a West Indian sugar plantation in settlement of a debt.  But there were opportunities for men like Harper to make money -- quickly and ruthlessly.

The money bought power.  It bought a house in Paris, a grotesque castle in New Jersey, and an island estate which Harper named "Sans Souci."  It bought fake Fragonards and original dresses from Worth and Molyneux.  It bought husbands -- Charles Blackwell, Jack Ware, Perry Gardiner, Jimmy Breed, Gordon Paine, and "that terrible Spanish Count."  And the Harper money towered over their lives, too.

Still, Edith -- in her seventies when the story opens -- feels that the past must be somehow redeemed, somehow ransomed.  Faced with Leona, her headstrong granddaughter who has run home to Edith because Edith's is really the only home she has, she feels that Leona must not be doomed to follow the family pattern.  It is Edith and Leona's struggle to accept and understand each other -- and ultimately to free themselves -- which lies at the heart of the novel.

Here, working on his broadest canvas to date, Mr. Birmingham gives us this pungent and absorbing new novel.  Those Harper Women, the men who variously loved and hated them -- and the one man whose immense fortune powered them all -- are unforgettable.

Condition:  Used.  Hardcover.  Dust cover is discolored and shows wear, creasing and tears in the edges.  Spine of dust cover is darkened by sun exposure.  Pages are tanned by age.  Previous owner's name is blacked out with the date written underneath on the front endpaper.  There's an envelope pasted to the front endpaper as a way to keep track of her books. Page 243-244 is creased.  Binding is in beginning stages of splitting throughout the book, but pages are in tact.

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