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 Angus covers 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.
Davidson, Jenny: - Jenny Davidson is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the author of four novels and four books of literary criticism. She was a fellow of the inaugural cohort at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in 2018-19, and she is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and Columbia University's Lenfest Distinguished Faculty and Mark Van Doren Teaching Awards, among other honors.
Hernández-Ehrisman, Laura: - Laura Hernández-Ehrisman is an associate professor and chair of the Department of University Studies at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, and the author of Inventing the Fiesta City: Heritage and Carnival in San Antonio.
Kilik, Margaret Brown: - Margaret Brown Kilik was raised by a single mother, and they moved frequently throughout the country during her childhood. Kilik graduated from the University of Toledo with a degree in English and subsequently lived in San Antonio, where she renewed a relationship with Eugene Kilik, whom she married. They spent the majority of their lives in New York City, where Kilik established and ran the Key Gallery in Soho. She was a collage artist and writer, and her only novel, The Duchess of Angus, written in the early 1950s, was discovered after her death. She died in New Jersey in 2001.
Miller, Char: - Char Miller, formerly a professor of history at Trinity University, is the W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis at Pomona College. He is the author of the award-winning Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism, Deep in the Heart of San Antonio: Land and Life in South Texas, and Public Lands/Public Debates: A Century of Controversy, as well as the editor of On the Border: An Environmental History of San Antonio and Fifty Years of the Texas Observer. His most recent books for Trinity University Press are Not So Golden State: Sustainability vs. the California Dream and On the Edge: Water, Immigration, and Politics in the Southwest. Miller is a frequent contributor to print, electronic, and social media.
