Edna Ferber’s The Girls (1921)

by Donald G. Evans

You don’t hear the terms “spinster,” or “Old Maid,” these days, much less read novels in which the heroines all fit the definition. You did and you did, though, in 1921, when Edna Ferber first published her novel, The Girls, a story that tracks three generations of Thrift women, all Charlottes, through lives absent husbands.

In the introduction to Belt Publishing’s 2023 re-release of The Girls, author Kathleen Rooney writes, “Ferber perfectly captures the unfulfilled feeling within so many conventional people and the petty tyranny a forceful normal family member can exert…” Then, “Through a gradual accumulation of events and encounters, Ferber shows how a bit of resistance and freethinking, especially when they are supported by other female family members, can set off a series of earthquakes that can shift a household’s--and a society’s—entire geography.”

The novel was praised critically more than a hundred years ago, when it originally came out. Writing in The New York Times on October 30, 1921, Louise Maunsell Field exclaimed, “Congratulations to Edna Ferber! For her new novel, The Girls, is not only the best, and very much the best, book she has as yet written, but it is also one of the best that has so far been produced upon its particular subject. It has a realism, a fairness, a sanity not often found, and especially rare in stories which portray, or profess to portray, the ‘flapper’ of the present day.”

This was Ferber’s seventh book-length publication; it came after Fanny Herself (1917), but before So Big (1924), Showboat (1926), American Beauty (1931) and Giant (1952).

I agree with Rooney, and Field—the novel is worthwhile, important, and relevant. All those things and more. You want to read Rooney’s introduction before discovering or re-discovering the pleasures and profits of The Girls; it’s a perfect entrée into this new old world.

For my money, though, the reason you should have already read this book is simpler: it’s a compelling and well-told story that deserves to be remembered rather than forgotten, and it’s superior to many contemporary novels of its ilk. It captures Chicago in pre-Civil War through World War I in ways more colorful and precise than history books. So, I enjoyed this novel for all the reasons I enjoy any good novel, and I relished a ground-level visit to the Chicago that preceded, but still bears enormous resemblance to, my Chicago.

Francis Hackett, reviewing the novel for the January 4, 1922 edition of The New Republic, thoroughly outlines Ferber’s expert understanding and integration of Chicago into the plot’s fabric. He wrote, “Miss Ferber marks a difference. She is not in the least strained. Chicago to her is one of the richest, most natural, most established of themes. She doesn't feel it necessary to get the whole thing in: she knows precisely what slice of the bourgeois community she wishes to cut. At the same time she is aware of all Chicago. The city permeates her book [The Girls]. Not only that, it permeates the three generations of Chicagoans with whom she so buoyantly and glowingly deals. She abounds in her sense of a living community whose origins are not hidden under the innumerable transfers and liens and notations of history but are vividly exposed to anyone with a feeling for drama. She rejoices in this drama and has the clearest professional instinct as to the way to handle it. To let Prairie Avenue, and the transmogrifications of Prairie Avenue, go to waste, is a piece of negligence luckily impossible to Miss Ferber. Here, she seems to say, is History caught in the act. Here is Charlotte Thrift in 1860 kissing Jesse Dick good-bye as he marches off to war—marching off in front of the Court House steps in full sight of the Addison Canes, the Thomas Holcombs, the Lewis Fullers, the Clapps … And here, in 1917, is the grand-niece Charley, saying good-bye over dinner and dance at the Bismarck Gardens, (now the Marigold Gardens), saying good-bye to her own Jesse Dick. In 1860 the boy was disreputable because he was a Dick of "Hardscrabble," a poor white Dick. In 1917 he was disreputable because he as the son of Delicatessen Dick, and a poet. Disreputable, that is, in the eyes of that lower middle-class Anglo-Saxon respectability which domesticated itself on Prairie Avenue and built a brick church over its safety deposit vaults wherever possible. So Miss Ferber focusses the rich and delicious contrast in what, for the Chicagoan, must be called an historical novel.”

Charlotte, Lotte, and Charley, our three spinsters, of course dominate this inbred narrative of family and individuality, but so too does Chicago. The omniscient narrator toggles seamlessly between the three Charlottes’ differing viewpoints, providing a connective tissue between generations but also highlighting stark discrepancies. Chicago is part of the fabric of their lives; it, like the Thrifts, expands, modernizes, and absorbs heavy losses, even as it appears, on the surface, to stand in one place.

Ferber’s prose constitutes a uniquely Chicago kind of love letter, shades of Carl Sandburg and James T. Farrell, as much as Harriet Monroe, as when “…the fishy smell that was Lake Michigan in March; the fertilizer smell that was the Stockyards when the wind was west; and the smoky smell that was soft coal from the IC trains and a million unfettered chimneys, all blending and mellowing to a rich mixture that was incense to her Chicago-bred nostrils.”

Indeed, the Thrifts were a South Side family, dating back to the early part of the 19^th century, when patriarch Isaac speculated that, contrary to popular opinion, land value there would appreciate most dramatically. “The Thrifts had been Chicago South Siders since that September in 1836 when Isaac Thrift had traveled tediously by rail, Sound steamer, river boat, canal boat, lake ship, and horse wagon from his native New York State to the unkempt prairie settlement on the banks of the sluggish stream that the Pottawatamie Indians called Che-ca-gou.” This portrait of a Chicago that ended around 18^th Street gives context to a story in which these three women live a cloistered existence even as they peer upon an endless expanse of possibilities. Ferber writes, “Chicago’s South Side in that day was a prairie waste where wolves howled on winter nights and where, in the summer, flowers grew so riotously as to make a trackless sea of bloom.” Isaac’s story constitutes the early history of the three Charlottes, but also the early history of Chicago itself, as he arrived, “to find his fortune in the welter of mud, swamp, Indians, frame shanties, and two-wheeled carts that constituted Chicago…”

Though the novel flashes backward and forward in time, it sets anchor in 1916, when the second of two Jesse Dicks confronts his potential involvement (and what it means to his relationship to the youngest Charlotte) in the impending war. It’s déjà vu for the eldest Charlotte, whose only real dalliance with romantic love ended with the death of her own Jesse Dick (Charley’s beau’s namesake) in the Civil War.

Like Arthur Meeker’s Prairie Avenue and Margaret Ayer Barnes’ Years of Grace, The Girls travels a great distance in time but not space. A high velocity of change, societal and personal, happens within the confines of a city often discredited from without but celebrated from within. The Girls highlights Chicago’s charms and riches (favorable comparisons to New York and great European cities dot the narrative), but also delights, at times, in the artistically apportioned flaws. In a nice sentence that precedes Nelson Algren’s oft-quoted “broken nose” line, Ferber writes, “Chicago was like a colossal and slovenly young woman who, possessing great natural beauty, is still content to slouch about in greasy wrapper and slippers run down at heel.”

Ferber, who never married or had children, knew the single woman landscape the three Charlottes navigated. Ferber, who spent more than a decade as a Chicago resident and returned often after her departure, knew the urban landscape upon which this novel is set. Ferber’s unique access to this story, along with the talent that ranked her among the most successful authors of her generation, results in a richly nuanced novel that if anything benefits from its age. 

The novel is in the public domain, and can be downloaded for free at sites like Project Guttenberg. The Belt Publishing re-release is readily available, as well—it garnered positive reviews from Patrick Reardon, Publisher’s Weekly, Chicago Review of Books’s Meredith Boe, The Reader's Dmitry Samarov, and in NewCity (an earlier iteration of this review).

It’s a highly quotable novel. Sometimes, you want to grab the highlighter to remember atmospheric beauties like, “The air was deliciously soft and balmy for April in Chicago. They whisked up Lake Shore Drive and into Lincoln Park. Lottie was almost ashamed of the feeling of freedom, of relaxation, of exaltation that flooded her whole being. She felt alive, and tingling and light. She was smiling unconsciously. On the way back Charley drew up at the curb along the outside drive at the edge of Lincoln Park, facing the lake. They sat wordlessly for a brief space in the healing quiet and peace and darkness, with the waves lipping the stones at their feet.” Other times, you want to underline resonate lines like, “Hyde Park is cut through by the Illinois Central tracks. All that summer and autumn and winter Charley would start up in her sleep at the sound of high shrill voices like the voices of children. Lottie Payson heard them, too, at night in the old house on Prairie and could not sleep again. The Illinois Central and Michigan Central trains were bringing boys to the training camps, or from the training camps to the points of embarkation. They were boys from Illinois farms, Wisconsin towns, Minnesota and Michigan villages.”

Ferber gained induction into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame in 2013. She was among the most celebrated, popular, and revered authors of her generation. There are many Ferber novels, stories, plays, and movie adaptations still worth your time, including The Girls. 

Donald G. Evans is the author of a novel and story collection, as well as the editor of two anthologies of Chicago literature, most recently Wherever I’m At: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry. He is the Founding Executive Director of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.