The Husbands Of Edith

by George Barr McCutcheon

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148 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1908

About the author

George Barr McCutcheon was an American popular novelist and playwright. His best known works include the series of novels set in Graustark, a fictional East European country, and the novel Brewster's Millions, which was adapted into a play and several films.

Reviews

[Bree (AnotherLookBook)]

Charming little comedy. Not much substance, but that’s not really the point of McCutcheon’s books. My copy was a 1908 edition with lovely green decoration in the margins of every page. That may very well end up being the thing I best remember about this book.

[Phil Syphe]

“The Husbands of Edith” is not, as I suspected it might be, about a woman who is married several times. The Edith of the title is in fact happily married to one man, however, the man in question needs to be in two places at one, thus he asks a good friend whom he meets in Paris to deputise for him so that he can return alone to London whilst Edith and her pretend husband travel to Vienna.

Have to say that apart from some quality George Bar McCutcheon humour, such as, “I once read of an Indian chief whose name was Young-Man-Afraid-of-his-Wife!” this isn’t amongst his best works.

This is more of a novella rather than a long novel and ideally the shorter the story, the fewer characters featured the better. This has too many characters for a short work like this. As a result, none of them stand out.

Long sections of third person narrative prove tedious, while scenes with several characters speaking at once proved confusing. As usual with this author, though, his greatest strength is two-way humorous dialogue, of which there was enough in this volume for me to rate it three stars instead of two.

I’ll end on a positive note by quoting a snippet of conversion between the hero of the piece and Edith’s sister, Connie. The opening line is the hero’s reaction to Connie ordering them both food & drink in a café:

"It was most appetising to watch you do that. I could live forever on nothing but tea and sandwiches if you were to order them."

"You've said a great many silly things to me this afternoon."