The Rustle of SilkCosmo HamiltonOmniClassics · Literature
The Rustle of Silk
Cosmo HamiltonA watchmaker's daughter imagines a larger life and fixes her hopes on a statesman she knows chiefly through his public image.
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About the book
Lola Breezy walks through London practicing the bearing of a grand lady, although her home belongs to the modest world of a Bayswater watchmaker's shop. A magazine portrait of the Home Secretary, Arthur Napier Fallaray, reveals the particular figure around whom her imagination has gathered. Fallaray's public gravity and divided domestic life make him an object of speculation for others as well. Hamilton brings these sharply separated social worlds into a romance concerned with attraction, ambition, and the discrepancy between reputation and private need. The opening deliberately observes Lola through a playwright's eye, inviting attention to the roles people seem fitted to perform. Her wish to escape an assigned station becomes entangled with the emotional expectations projected upon a famous man.
- Social aspiration
- Public image and private life
- Romantic projection
Why read it
The magazine portrait gives Lola's apparently vague longing a concrete object, connecting celebrity culture with class ambition.
English Grosset and Dunlap edition bearing the 1922 copyright
Contents and reading sections
- Section 1
- Section 2
- Section 3
- Section 4
- Section 5
- Section 6
- Section 7
- Section 8
- Section 9
- Section 10
- Section 11
- Section 12
- Section 13
- Section 14
- Section 15
- Section 16
- Section 17
- Section 18
- Section 19
- Section 20
- Section 21
- Section 22
- Section 23
- Section 24
- Section 25
- Section 26
- Section 27
- Section 28
- Section 29
- Section 30
- Section 31
- Section 32
- Section 33
- Section 34
- Section 35
- Section 36
- Section 37
- Section 38
- Section 39
- Section 40
- Section 41
- Section 42
- Section 43
- Section 44
- Section 45