Description

Now that her father's away at war, 19-year-old Josephine (Joey) Dale has a lot to manage: an artistic sister, a frivolous mother, two small terrors of cousins, and a high-brow fiance who loves her for her "beautiful character". When she also accepts a commission from her mother's old school chum to find a bride for her engineering officer son before he's sent to the Front, is she taking on too much -- or is this just the job to shake up Joey's practical, self-sacrificing life?

Notes

Bridge of Kisses features another of early-Berta's delightfully unreliable narrators. Joey Dale is domestically competent, generously openhearted -- and completely clueless. At times, to a degree that strains credulity, perhaps, but Berta does these young female MCs so well that you're 100% in their corner, even when you feel like shaking them. The more you read vintage light fiction, the more you realize it's not easy to do a very young female lead, particularly first person, well enough to make the love story plausible (Anne Duffield, for instance, struggles a lot here) but Berta is ace at this kind of character-building. Joey is wholly lovable and her bridge-builder is a mate to match: a kind and capable young man who sees her worth and her beauty (which she, herself, continually doubts).

The "villain" in the piece, Joey's pompous, domineering, pseudo-intellectual fiance is definitely a trope of the time. Joey finds his personality uncongenial and his physical person repulsive, but she's going to marry him and sleep with him -- which she openly dreads -- for the sake of her family's financial security. The power that unpleasant, undeserving men were able to exercise due to their sex, status, and women's circumscribed opportunities is a common theme in popular fiction throughout the 19th and well into the 20th century. The most harrowing version I've encountered so far is in Juliet Wilbor Tompkin's The Starling (MC's father in that case) and Hilary Sykes isn't that bad, by any means, but glimpses of the bullying and emotional abuse Joey would endure as his wife give a sobering edge to what is otherwise a gossamer-light story.

Joey's little cousin charges -- the 3- and 5-year-old O.U.2.'s (Oh, you two...) are a lot of fun and clearly modeled after Ruck's own boys. Their adventures also illustrate how much less constrained and surveilled children's lives were at the time -- it made me sigh for the stroller- and play-structure-bound kids today. And her distinction between the two types of women, "the sort of wife who would boil her children to make soup for her husband" and the sort of mother who would do the same in reverse, is an interesting take on women's emotional lives, to say the least.

A very enjoyable hour and another comfort-read.

Tags

1900-1909, 1910-1919, English, Europe, England, Welsh, childcare, babysitting, unpaid, comedy, comfort-read, determined, engineer, f/m, family, parent, responsible for, family, sibling, responsible for, female, first-person, generous, hair, dark, love at first sight, naive/silly, romance, selfless, single, soldier, stodgy fiance(e), strong, tall, unreliable narrator, young

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