The Chaperone

Laura Moriarty

Jun 2012 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

Soon to be a feature film from the creators of Downton Abbey starring Elizabeth McGovern, The Chaperone is a New York Times-bestselling novel about the woman who chaperoned an irreverent Louise Brooks to New York City in the 1920s and the summer that would change them both.
 
Only a few years before becoming a famous silent-film star and an icon of her generation, a fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks leaves Wichita, Kansas, to study with the prestigious Denishawn School of Dancing in New York. Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a thirty-six-year-old chaperone, who is neither mother nor friend. Cora Carlisle, a complicated but traditional woman with her own reasons for making the trip, has no idea what she’s in for. Young Louise, already stunningly beautiful and sporting her famous black bob with blunt bangs, is known for her arrogance and her lack of respect for convention. Ultimately, the five weeks they spend together will transform their lives forever.
 
For Cora, the city holds the promise of discovery that might answer the question at the core of her being, and even as she does her best to watch over Louise in this strange and bustling place she embarks on a mission of her own. And while what she finds isn’t what she anticipated, she is liberated in a way she could not have imagined. Over the course of Cora’s relationship with Louise, her eyes are opened to the promise of the twentieth century and a new understanding of the possibilities for being fully alive.
 
Drawing on the rich history of the 1920s, ’30s, and beyond—from the orphan trains to Prohibition, flappers,  and the onset of the Great Depression to the burgeoning movement for equal rights and new opportunities for women—Laura Moriarty’s The Chaperone illustrates how rapidly everything, from fashion and hemlines to values and attitudes, was changing at this time and what a vast difference it all made for Louise Brooks, Cora Carlisle, and others like them.

Ratings and reviews

A Wichita woman takes on a job as a chaperone to the teenage daughter of a wealthy local family. The chaperone and the teenager set off to New York City where the teenager hopes to become a Broadway star and the chaperone hopes to find her birth parents. The characters have big secrets that come to light throughout the book. Their lives were full of disappointment and adversity but they managed dispite it. I really liked this book.

This book allows the reader to inhabit the life of a female during a very changing period of American history. The details of day to day life, the moralistic judgements that were an every day occurence, the belief that others could determine what was best for you - even as an adult let alone a helpless child - are inserted into the story with great finesse. The author captured everything so well. This is REAL history.

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About the author

Laura Moriarty is the author of The Center of Everything, The Rest of Her Life, and While I’m Falling.  She lives in Lawrence, Kansas.