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 1930s 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 Hernandez-Ehrisma and Char Miller.
By:
Margaret Brown Kilik
Afterword by:
Char Miller
Foreword by:
Laura Hernndez-Ehrisman
Introduction by:
Jenny Davidson
Imprint: Trinity University Press,U.S.
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 203mm,
Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9781595349071
ISBN 10: 1595349073
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 09 June 2020
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Table of Contents: Foreword: Reflections on Revolutionary Women -- Dolores Huerta Preface - Kathy Sosa Introduction: Setting the Scene of Revolutionary Women in Texas and Mexico - Jennifer Speed Section I: The Era of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 Las Soldaderas - Elena Poniatowska Juana Belen Gutierrez de Mendoza - Cristina D. Ramirez Valentinas, no! Valientas, si! Cristina Sosa and Leonila Ortiz Sosa [AM1] - Lionel Sosa The Perservationists: Adina DeZavala, Rena Maverick Green, Emily Edwards - Lewis F. Fisher Concepcion Acevedo de la Llata - Jennifer Speed Section II: Las Antepasadas : Women Revolutionaries prior to the Mexican Revolution of 1910 Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz - Alicia Gaspar de Alba Virgin of Guadalupe - Virgilio P. Elizondo Jane McManus Cazneau - Linda Hudson Teresa Urrea - Sandra Cisneros Malinalli La Malinche - Laura Esquivel Section III: The Legacy : Women Revolutionaries of the Post-Revolution Era Alice Dickerson Montemayor - Cynthia Orozoco Emma Tenayuca - Carmen Tafolla Frida Kahlo - Amalia Mesa-Bains Genoveva Morales -Elaine Ayala Nahui Olin - Teresa Van Hoy Gloria Anzaldua - Ellen Riojas Clark Chavela Vargas - Sandra Cisneros Women of Guerrero - Marta Lamas Epilogue: title TK - Norma Cantu
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 York in 2001.
Reviews for The Duchess of Angus
Utterly absorbing as both a character study and as a transmission from a lost era. - David Liss, author of The Devil's Company A time capsule back to 1940's San Antonio, Texas. Jane Davis is earnest, confused, and wonderfully headstrong as she confronts a changing, inhospitable world...Her story still resonates. - Marcy Dermansky, author of The Red Car Witty, sharp, and surprising. An electric switch that illuminates the intense friendship between two young women and their vibrant, complicated 1940s San Antonio. - Chelsey Johnson, author of Stray City Intense, witty, humorous, brutally honest, and full of life...An intriguing and provocative novel from a newly discovered literary voice. - Xiaolu Guo, author of Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China
