Escapade – 4 Stars
Evelyn Scott is a little lost to the ages, but might be making a comeback in awareness/popularity. She a very well known novel called The Wave, which takes place during the Civil War (I haven’t read it, but I am hoping it’s much better than that other very well known Civil War novel at the same time), and a few memoir books.
This book was written when she was about 30, and several years after the events in it happened. When she was 19, she ran off to Brazil with a married college professor and lived a much less privileged (but still pretty life) in Brazil. She’s becomes pregnant and the whole thing is really fascinating and harrowing. It’s not a misery-laden book, but there’s a lot of struggle and pain in the book. It’s also interesting because it’s both mired in self-criticism and doubt, but also defiant of those censures as well. Like a few other very popular memoirs of that moment (I am most thinking about Robert Graves’s Good Bye to All That) it goes there in a way that I otherwise wouldn’t guess a book would.