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    Now, Voyager
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    Now, Voyager
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    Now, Voyager
    Ebook355 pages6 hours

    Now, Voyager

    By Olive Higgins Prouty

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    That iconic American melodrama that inspired the 1943 cult classic film starring Bette Davis.

    “Don’t let’s ask for the moon! We have the stars!”

    The film Now, Voyager concludes with these famous words, which reaffirmed Bette Davis’s own stardom and changed the way Americans smoked cigarettes. But few fans of this rich story know its source. Olive Higgins Prouty’s 1941 novel provides a rich, complex portrait of the inner life of its protagonist and the society she inhabits. Over half a century later, it still offers fresh and quietly radical takes on psychiatric treatment, traditional family life, female desire, and women’s agency.

    Boston blueblood Charlotte Vale has led an unhappy, sheltered life. Dowdy, repressed, and pushing forty, Charlotte finds salvation in the unlikely form of a nervous breakdown, placing her at a sanitarium, where she undergoes treatment to rebuild her ravaged self-esteem and uncover her true intelligence and charm.

    Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe Feminist Press at CUNY
    Release dateAug 10, 2012
    ISBN9781558616332
    Unavailable
    Now, Voyager

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    Reviews for Now, Voyager

    3.5/5

    34 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Another book I received because it was the basis of one of my favorite movies. The book and film are very close in story and I enjoyed the story of Charlotte Vale (who could now be no one else but Bette Davis) even in my second reading. There is a little history hidden throughout - a documentation of expected roles and options for women in the 1940s.
    • 4/5
      After my recent disappointment with The African Queen, I was quite relieved to find that this book is quite worthy of another of my favorite movies. The movie follows the story closely and lifts much of the significant dialog verbatim. The story is richer in detail, giving more insight into the motivations of Charlotte, Jerry, and even to a certain extent Dr. Jaquith. I'm now on the hunt for Olive Higgins Prouty's other books about the Vale family.
    • 3/5
      When I found this hidden in the stacks at the library, I snatched it as though it was a prize jewel. For a long time now, I've wanted to take a crack at Prouty's work, especially since becoming aware of her connection with Sylvia Plath. But unfortunately, like Plath, I'm not crazy about Prouty's writing style. Alas. The plot, however, is fantastic, and extremely unconventional for the time.
    • 4/5
      Not the book I expected it to be. I've seen the Bette David movie based on this book a dozen times, so I expected a slightly weepy romance. What I got was a rather surprising story filled with subtext, a story about a woman breaking the mold for women of her class and her time -- single by choice, in charge of her own money and her own sexuality, raising a child on her own and maintaining her own life. Not what I'd expect of a book written in the 1940s.

      Of course, if you aren't familiar with the story of Charlotte Vale, of the Boston Vales, then you might be forgiven for not quite seeing in this story what I see, but it's all there -- hidden a bit because of the expectations of those times, muted with wind blown curtains and swelling violins, but it's there. She's a remarkable woman despite her rich white privilege -- yes, today it seems like she hardly has any problems at all, just a domineering mother who wants to control every aspect of her life and a flock of family ready to see her strait jacketed into a preconceived role in life.

      The book surprised me, and I feel a little ashamed to have been surprised. It's sometimes more shocking to realize the things about life and society we think are so contemporary, so modern, were really just as much a part of life 50 years ago.