Joy Street By Frances Parkinson Keyes

This is one of the later Novels of Frances Keyes, an American novelist. She was born to an upper class family and her husband went into politics. She wrote several novels set in New England and others in the American South. Her views were old fashioned as she admitted but she had some real talent. Joy Street is a residential Street in Boston, and the novel is set in the 1930s, going to the end of World War Two. Emily Thayer is from an old Boston family, conservative Republicans and she is now 20 or so, and has been out in society for a couple of years. Her mother is a flighty socialite, who enjoys flirting with men and her father, Sumner Thayer, is a rather sad man who has retired from his job and leads a dull quiet life, dominated by his wife. Emily is more liberal minded than her family in general but she is a quiet girl who dislikes argument and so she does not fight with her relatives. She is closest to her grandmother, Mrs Forbes who is now an elderly widow. Mrs Forbes was a great beauty and lived abroad as American ambassadress for many years so she is less hidebound in her thinking than her children. Her son Sherman lives in Cape Cod and has a business growing cranberries and he keeps his distance from his mother. So does her daughter Elizabeth who has given up society and teaches at an elite girls' school. Emily is in love with Roger Field, a quiet shy young man who is well born but poor, and she hopes he'd ask her to marry him but he seems unwilling to do so.