What do you think?
Rate this book
The Duchess of Angus
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 territories 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 Hernández-Ehrisma and Char Miller.
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 territories 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 Hernández-Ehrisma and Char Miller.
- GenresHistorical Fiction
272 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 23, 2020
1 person is currently reading
66 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 13, 2020
This story is set in 1940s San Antonio in the middle of WWII. Jane Davis is a young woman living a somewhat carefree life in the heart of the city. Her mother runs a flophouse just blocks from the Alamo and Jane works in the sporting goods department of Joske's Department Store. Living with Jane and her mother is her brother Jess and her mother's friend Lillie Du Lac. Jane's co-worker Wade Howell is a young promiscuous woman still living at home with her mother and step-father known as "The Colonel", who happens to be Lillie Du Lac's ex-husband.
Jane has been in awe of the beautiful Wade since she met her. The two strike up a friendship and the young ladies navigate their way through the dating scene with various soldiers from the local military bases and are forced to deal with the uncomfortable connection between their households.
This is a good but somewhat raw story. Kilik wrote this story in the 1950s when she was living in San Antonio but never had it published. Her descendent Jenny Davidson obtained the unpublished novel and attempted to clean up obvious grammatical mistakes to make it publishable. It actually reads pretty well and has areas of some fun humor. It was written in an era of less tolerance, and so there is some stereotyping and racially biased comments. Davidson includes a couple of articles of local historians and authors who provide contextual analysis of the story and its themes and language.
It was worth the read and I enjoyed the story that takes place in the city where I live and that I love.
Jane has been in awe of the beautiful Wade since she met her. The two strike up a friendship and the young ladies navigate their way through the dating scene with various soldiers from the local military bases and are forced to deal with the uncomfortable connection between their households.
This is a good but somewhat raw story. Kilik wrote this story in the 1950s when she was living in San Antonio but never had it published. Her descendent Jenny Davidson obtained the unpublished novel and attempted to clean up obvious grammatical mistakes to make it publishable. It actually reads pretty well and has areas of some fun humor. It was written in an era of less tolerance, and so there is some stereotyping and racially biased comments. Davidson includes a couple of articles of local historians and authors who provide contextual analysis of the story and its themes and language.
It was worth the read and I enjoyed the story that takes place in the city where I live and that I love.
April 6, 2021
First of all, omg, I am blown away by how good this little book is. I'm surprised to learn that Margaret Brown Kilik's manuscript sat unread for decades before her passing. At least it's out now, and we can cherish it as the tidy little artifact that it is today.
Secondly, this review will be longer than my other reviews as I'm a proud resident of San Antonio, the city in which the entirety of this novel takes place -- and boy, is this novel a symphony for the city that I call home.
The Duchess of Angus is about a character named Jane Davis as she comes into her own as a budding young woman. She's fresh out of college, returned home to her humble living situation, and ready to meet suitors... or is she? This book is exhilarating at many turns, so much so that I have to review it before even finishing -- well, I finished the novel itself, but I have yet to read the accompanying essays at the end of the book (i.e., Dr. Char Miller's historical commentary about the urban core of 1940s San Antonio and Laura Hernández-Ehrisman's exploration of the Latinx community in early twentieth century San Antonio).
Jenny Davidson, heir to Brown Kilik's manuscript and Brown Kilik's daughter-in-law, opens the book with an introduction contextualizing some of the novel's stray conceits. In her introduction, she details some of the uncomfortable elements, such as casual racism and ableist ignorance. In truth, these sentiments are honestly mild at their most extreme, and while I don't want to be the "I'm Mexican [which I am], and I thought that the racism [to which I am typically very sensitive] was fine!" I must admit that no one in this novel explicitly says anything racist. If anything, the racism lies in its erasure: Latinxs in this novel are relegated either to background vendors/contractors, waitstaff, or they're sexualized to a lukewarm degree (at one point, the characters talk about a Hispanic girl who was rumored to be the most beautiful in the city, and at another point a young Hispanic gentleman loiters seductively in the hallway of a military matron, if I understood correctly).
As a matter of fact, let's get to that "if I understood correctly" comment.
Trinity University Press, the publishing house, leaves an editor's note in the introduction about the daunting task of editing Brown Kilik's book. I don't doubt that they did everything they could to make it readable, but at many points the novel is difficult to follow. What should have been a single-sitting novel took me three sittings to untangle just what was taking place during several colloquies. In conversations among several characters at once, Brown Kilik (vis-à-vis TUP) does a poor job of delineating which character is actually speaking at any given moment, and in many instances, I had to re-read entire sections of the book just to make sure I "understood correctly." I feel that TUP could have exercised greater creative license for this problem, and I hope that in future editions they take liberties to fix it -- but I'm no employee of a publishing house, so I don't know what they're exactly capable of doing.
In any event, now that I've covered the book's majors flaws, I want to talk about the themes which are just so darn playful, especially for its time. This book is about a young woman's understanding of her place in the world, whether it's at the side of a virile military cadet or in the footsteps of her mother as a spinster crafting her own identity. The interpersonal dynamics of women in this novel are so fascinating to pin down. Some of the dramatis personæ include traditional débutantes, divorcées, entrepreneuses, and then there's Jane Davis who is the archetypal wild & free, scrappy woman. She goes out to clubs, drinks booze, reads books, dates men left and right, and she even makes friends/frienemies with other women under the express pretense of discovering who she wants to be through them. She comes across a new girlfriend, Wade Howell, who utilizes her sex to do, well, interesting and nebulous things.
My favorite characters in this book were Lillie du Lac, who comes across initially as a mean-spirited restauranteuse, and Martha Saunders, whose role I can perfectly envision actress Allison Janey filling in a film adaptation someday. Other memorable characters include Mira, a possible widow whose husband is believed to have gone AWOL during the war, and Jess, Jane's invalid older brother whose heart of gold shines brighter than the Texas sun. I just loved all of the characters in this book. Everyone was so full of spirit and earnestness, and I felt like these characters were my own friends in a way, especially coming from this city where these types still exist today.
If you are a woman and you are from San Antonio, this book is a must-read. Brown Kilik's ambiguous ending is just the right amount of complexity to leave you wondering what happens to her beloved heroine. I so wish we had a series of Jane Davis books, but alas, her legacy is lost to time along with Margaret Brown Kilik herself.
Five out of five stars because this book merits greater exposure.
Secondly, this review will be longer than my other reviews as I'm a proud resident of San Antonio, the city in which the entirety of this novel takes place -- and boy, is this novel a symphony for the city that I call home.
The Duchess of Angus is about a character named Jane Davis as she comes into her own as a budding young woman. She's fresh out of college, returned home to her humble living situation, and ready to meet suitors... or is she? This book is exhilarating at many turns, so much so that I have to review it before even finishing -- well, I finished the novel itself, but I have yet to read the accompanying essays at the end of the book (i.e., Dr. Char Miller's historical commentary about the urban core of 1940s San Antonio and Laura Hernández-Ehrisman's exploration of the Latinx community in early twentieth century San Antonio).
Jenny Davidson, heir to Brown Kilik's manuscript and Brown Kilik's daughter-in-law, opens the book with an introduction contextualizing some of the novel's stray conceits. In her introduction, she details some of the uncomfortable elements, such as casual racism and ableist ignorance. In truth, these sentiments are honestly mild at their most extreme, and while I don't want to be the "I'm Mexican [which I am], and I thought that the racism [to which I am typically very sensitive] was fine!" I must admit that no one in this novel explicitly says anything racist. If anything, the racism lies in its erasure: Latinxs in this novel are relegated either to background vendors/contractors, waitstaff, or they're sexualized to a lukewarm degree (at one point, the characters talk about a Hispanic girl who was rumored to be the most beautiful in the city, and at another point a young Hispanic gentleman loiters seductively in the hallway of a military matron, if I understood correctly).
As a matter of fact, let's get to that "if I understood correctly" comment.
Trinity University Press, the publishing house, leaves an editor's note in the introduction about the daunting task of editing Brown Kilik's book. I don't doubt that they did everything they could to make it readable, but at many points the novel is difficult to follow. What should have been a single-sitting novel took me three sittings to untangle just what was taking place during several colloquies. In conversations among several characters at once, Brown Kilik (vis-à-vis TUP) does a poor job of delineating which character is actually speaking at any given moment, and in many instances, I had to re-read entire sections of the book just to make sure I "understood correctly." I feel that TUP could have exercised greater creative license for this problem, and I hope that in future editions they take liberties to fix it -- but I'm no employee of a publishing house, so I don't know what they're exactly capable of doing.
In any event, now that I've covered the book's majors flaws, I want to talk about the themes which are just so darn playful, especially for its time. This book is about a young woman's understanding of her place in the world, whether it's at the side of a virile military cadet or in the footsteps of her mother as a spinster crafting her own identity. The interpersonal dynamics of women in this novel are so fascinating to pin down. Some of the dramatis personæ include traditional débutantes, divorcées, entrepreneuses, and then there's Jane Davis who is the archetypal wild & free, scrappy woman. She goes out to clubs, drinks booze, reads books, dates men left and right, and she even makes friends/frienemies with other women under the express pretense of discovering who she wants to be through them. She comes across a new girlfriend, Wade Howell, who utilizes her sex to do, well, interesting and nebulous things.
My favorite characters in this book were Lillie du Lac, who comes across initially as a mean-spirited restauranteuse, and Martha Saunders, whose role I can perfectly envision actress Allison Janey filling in a film adaptation someday. Other memorable characters include Mira, a possible widow whose husband is believed to have gone AWOL during the war, and Jess, Jane's invalid older brother whose heart of gold shines brighter than the Texas sun. I just loved all of the characters in this book. Everyone was so full of spirit and earnestness, and I felt like these characters were my own friends in a way, especially coming from this city where these types still exist today.
If you are a woman and you are from San Antonio, this book is a must-read. Brown Kilik's ambiguous ending is just the right amount of complexity to leave you wondering what happens to her beloved heroine. I so wish we had a series of Jane Davis books, but alas, her legacy is lost to time along with Margaret Brown Kilik herself.
Five out of five stars because this book merits greater exposure.
May 2, 2020
I read it for the 1940s San Antonio setting--it didn't disappoint--and I loved it for that sole reason. It also successfully reminded me of being 21, and how carefree it was when your life revolved around a social group and its hangouts. But mostly, it's tough to follow her wit and is densely written. However, at one point the character goes on a joy ride to the airbase that is my work place, and it was awesome!! Also, this town provides a lively setting. If I could, I'd write this, but better. (Apologies for a scattershot review. I'm just proud I finished it the day it was due back to the library!)
P.S. Written before A Confederacy of Dunces, but similar to it, in that "the town is a (vivacious) character" and there's some solid humor. Different in its discussion of female sexuality.
P.S. Written before A Confederacy of Dunces, but similar to it, in that "the town is a (vivacious) character" and there's some solid humor. Different in its discussion of female sexuality.
October 26, 2020
Both a finely drawn portrait of a particular time/place (downtown San Antonio during WWII) and a timeless story of waiting for life to start. Somehow both a quick read and a literary work seeking with meaning.
December 3, 2022
Enjoyable read because of all the references to San Antonio.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews