Beauty

by Faith Baldwin

2nd printing, 238 pages, a touching novel of a beautiful young woman who understood her career better than she did her heart

Genres: Fiction, Romance

355 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1940

About the author

Faith Baldwin attended private academies and finishing schools, and in 1914-16 she lived in Dresden, Germany. She married Hugh H. Cuthrell in 1920, and the next year she published her first novel, Mavis of Green Hill. Although she often claimed she did not care for authorship, her steady stream of books belies that claim; over the next 56 years she published more than 85 books, more than 60 of them novels with such titles as Those Difficult Years (1925), The Office Wife (1930), Babs and Mary Lou (1931), District Nurse (1932), Manhattan Nights (1937), and He Married a Doctor (1944). Her last completed novel, Adam's Eden, appeared in 1977.

Typically, a Faith Baldwin book presents a highly simplified version of life among the wealthy. No matter what the difficulties, honour and goodness triumph, and hero and heroine are united. Evil, depravity, poverty, and sex found no place in her work, which she explicitly intended for the housewife and the working girl. The popularity of her writing was enormous. In 1936, in the midst of the Great Depression, she published five novels in magazine serial form and three earlier serials in volume form and saw four of her works made into motion pictures, for an income that year in excess of $315,000. She also wrote innumerable stories, articles, and newspaper columns, no less ephemeral than the novels.

Reviews

[Samantha Glasser · Rating 4 out of 5]

Letty Lawson is a young single woman whose father died and left her with very little to live on. The family they rented from for many years offers to take her in, and their daughter Carol encourages her to get a job at the beauty salon where she works. Most of the girls there have aspirations of finding a rich benefactor through their connections at the salon, and Carol is no different, but Letty has scruples. Instead, she studies the business in hopes of starting her own salon and making her way in the world without sacrificing her morality.

This book became the pre-code film Beauty for Sale. The movie is much more entertaining because it fleshes out the somewhat standard characters created here.

“Most of them could finger wave, but marcelling was another matter.” I was under the impression they were the same thing. No?

[Kathleen Vincenz · Rating 3 out of 5]

The movie made based on this is much better: Beauty for Sale, 1933, starring Madge Evans, Otto Kruger, and Una Merkel.

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another "old" book, published in 1933. Letty starts her beauty salon, backed financially with a married man. When it's time to make her decision, something happens that makes her decision easier but still painful. An unsophisticated story, with love and tragedy (neither described with much emotion). Emotions are not shallow or false but not really "real." I cannot remember if I have read any other stories by this author but I feel that her writing is typical of the era.