The Duchess of Angus

Plath’s The Bell Jar and McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter meet South Texas struggles with gender, class, and race

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 1930''s 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 Anguscovers 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.