Years of Grace is a 1930 novel by Margaret Ayer Barnes.
The protagonist is Jane Ward, later Jane Ward Carver, and the story covers 37 years of her life. The story starts out in 1893 Chicago, with Jane aged 14 and the younger daughter of the very rich Ward family. Jane pushes against her strict and controlling mother, never more so than when Jane, now aged 17, falls into a whirlwind romance with a rich boy named Andre. Her parents put a stop to that romance and instead send Jane off to college at Bryn Mawr.
Years roll by, as Jane flirts with feminism then accepts her gender role, eventually becoming a wife and mother, even as The Great War breaks out, Prohibition undermines trust in the law, and America goes through wrenching changes.
Tropes:
- Acrofatic: A random moment towards the end has Jane picking up her grandchildren from dance class. Jane observes a fat girl who has to dance with the teacher because no one will dance with her, and she wryly reflects that every dance class has a fat girl who can't get a partner. Then the kids start dancing, most of them poorly, but not the fat girl who "was moving about the room with the grace of a fairy."
- Ambiguously Gay: Stephen's older sister Cicily aka "Silly" is vaguely implied to be a lesbian. The story is told from Jane's POV and Jane, a 21-year-old woman in 1898, can't really conceptualize a lesbian. But she notes that Silly hunts with hounds, sails in boat races, is "somehow lank and mannish" in appearance, and is unmarried at 31.
- It gets less ambiguous later, after the 15-year Time Skip, when Silly is said to be wearing a shirt "buttoned mannishly about her neck", with a tie. Silly would like nothing better than to live with Susan, another middle-aged unmarried woman, but she can't get financial independence from her family. Jane, being Jane, still doesn't figure it out.
- Pretty much the same thing happens with Jane's daughter Jenny, who, after receiving an $800K bequest from her grandfather, announces that she's leaving to start a dog breeding business with her "friend" Barbara. Jane seems to catch on this time, telling her that "that sort of mutually inclusive and exclusive friendship with another girl is not very wise. It doesn't lead to anything."
Jenny: We're not marrying women—at least we never have been—we're not interested in husbands—we're interested in ourselves. - Anguished Declaration of Love:
- Andre has to stop and steel himself, looking at Jane on a moonlight stroll before he finally says "I—love you."
- Later Stephen goes through basically the same thing, when the prospect of Jane going on an extended vacation with her parents causes him to spill the beans. That makes it pretty awkward when Jane answers by saying she doesn't love him. (Eventually, though, she caves and marries him.)
"I love you," said Stephen. He said the three words very quickly, with a funny little gasp at the end. His face was flushed.- Jane herself finally does this, when Jimmy's full court press finally gets her to confess her adulterous feelings.
"Yes," whispered Jane. "I—I love you." Her eyes were on the cloud-shadows racing across the lawn. She could hardly believe that she had uttered the sentence that rang in her ears. It had fluttered from her lips before she was aware. - Birth-Death Juxtaposition: Jane's father dies after catching pneumonia shortly after the end of World War I. Two pages (and six weeks) later, Jane's daughter Cicily delivers twins. Jane finds herself wishing that her father had lived long enough to see his first great-grandchildren.
- Carpe Diem: Jimmy presses this point very strongly when trying to get Jane to leave her husband and children and run away with him."We've only one life to live, Jane, and that life's half over. Let's make the most of it while it lasts."
- Divorce in Reno: Part of the resolution of Cicily and Albert's incredibly embarrassing affair. Belle agrees to go to Reno to get a divorce from Albert, and Cicily then takes a boat to France to get divorced from Jack and married to Albert.
- Dogged Nice Guy: Stephen's response to being flatly told by Jane that she doesn't love him, is to say that he's going to keep romancing her until she changes her mind."I'll ask you and ask you," said Stephen, "until some day—"
- Driven to Suicide: Lily Furness, a married woman and mother to Jane's cousin Flora, was having an affair with Bert Lancaster—Jane knows this because she saw them canoodling in a boat at the 1893 World's Fair. A few years later, when Bert marries a girl half his age (Muriel, another of Jane's friends), Lily kills herself by turning on the gas.
- Extra! Extra! Read All About It!: Mentioned, as the third person POV has Jane remembering "The hoarse, raucous voices of newsboys, crying the last extras on the disaster," that disaster being the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor in 1898.
- The Generation Gap: A running theme, as Jane watches the strict Victorian morality that she grew up in the 1890s and early 1900s give way to the hard-drinking, hard-partying, sexually liberated 1920s. Jane, who gave up a youthful romance with Andre and an adulterous romance with Jimmy because old-school morality dictated it, is irritated to see her daughter Cicily making exactly the opposite decisions.In Jane's mother's time a girl who got drunk, a woman who was divorced, was an outcast, a public scandal, a skeleton in a family closet. In her time and Isabel's she was a deplorable curiosity—more to be pitied than censured, perhaps, but always to be deplored. Now Cicily regarded intoxication as an incidental accident, dependent on the quality of bootlegged liquor that was served at a party. She regarded divorce as a practical aid to monogamous living.
- Jane ends the novel deeply disappointed in her daughter and the younger generation all getting divorced and remarried, but she reflects that all you can do with children is send them out in to the world. The last line of the book is: "When you looked at a child, Jane reflected solemnly, you could never believe that it would grow up to disappoint you."
- Generation Xerox: Jane tried to get married at 17 to Andre, and 20 years later her daughter Cicily gets engaged at 19. Jane is unhappy, not so much at the marriage, but by the fact that her parents blocked her marriage in 1898 while, thanks to changing social mores, she can't do the same to Cicily in 1918.
- Gossipy Hens: Many. Muriel starts gossiping in their social circle about seeing Jane and Jimmy enjoying a champagne lunch, which gets to Isabel and leads Isabel to tell her sister to stop dining out with Jimmy.
- Gray Rain of Depression: Jane's parents force her to come home from Bryn Mawr a year early. The wind kicks up and the rain starts as she's walking off. She is also depressed because her friend Agnes is going off to be a writer while Jane is going back home to boring Chicago social life.Jane was leaving for the West a little later. Her last glimpse of the campus would be in the rain.
- Historical Domain Character: Jane sees John Philip Sousa conducting a band at the 1893 World's Fair.
- It Will Never Catch On: Jane's mother reacts to talk of war with Spain in 1898 by saying "There will never be another war between civilized people."
- Kissing Cousins: A horrified Stephen tries to argue against Cicily's impending marriage to Jack by pointing out that he's her first cousin (son to Jane's sister Isabel). Cicily is unimpressed, stating that there are no hereditary disorders in the Ward family line.
- Moral Guardians: Jane's mother is an example of hyper-strict Victorian morality and prudishness. She is embarrassed by the presence of family friend Edith Lester in their home after Edith gets pregnant, even though Edith is married, and tells Jane not to even talk about the baby. She flips out when she discovers that Jane and Andre have been reading Camille and refuses to let Jane even see Andre afterwards.
- Obnoxious In-Laws: Jane is irritated by her in-laws, and especially her mother-in-law, who talks endlessly and second-guesses Jane's decisions about the children.
- Old Flame Fizzle: The book ends with Jane in Paris, meeting Andre 33 years after their separation. She finds him a bitter old cynic, having married a younger woman who regularly cheats on him. She is disappointed at their reunion, regarding him as "dead" and wishing that she hadn't seen him and could still remember the romantic young man of 1897.
- The One That Got Away: Andre. Jane never quite gets over Andre, how both sets of parents intervened to stop their marriage when Jane was 17, and how a few years later she went ahead and married Stephen when she finally got a letter from Andre in Paris saying he was delaying his return for a while. In Part III, which finds Jane in 1913 having been married to Stephen for 15 years, she is disquieted to learn that Andre married a gorgeous heiress half his age. When Jane mentions Andre to Jimmy, Jimmy, who himself is trying to seduce Jane, cheerfully points out that Jane still carries a torch for Andre.
- Organ Grinder: As war looms in April 1898 and Jane worries about Stephen enlisting, she hears an organ grinder and his monkey and momentarily cheers up. To Jane, organ grinders are a symbol of the coming of spring.
- Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Agnes the would-be author has been sending off story after story and getting rejection after rejection. Finally she gets a story accepted, telling Jane that "Scribner's—has—taken—my—story."
- Sizable Semitic Nose: Jane contemplates Mrs. Lester at Mrs. Lester's 75th birthday party, Mrs. Lester being part of a Jewish family that has tried to assimilate in WASP Chicago. She observes Mrs. Lester's "great gaunt nose hooked over her ridiculous cascade of double chins" and decides that she has "come to look much more Jewish" in her old age.
- Slice of Life: There isn't really a dramatic arc. It's simply a character story of one woman, and her evolution from a wide-eyed teen to a middle-aged housewife.
- Time Skip: More than one as the narrative goes through some 30 years of Jane's life. A 15-year skip from 1898 to 1913 takes Jane from a newlywed to a middle-aged wife and mother.
- Wrong Side of the Tracks: Quite literally in the form of Jane's friend Agnes, who is from a middle-class family. Her mother disapproves of Jane seeing Agnes.Jane...crossed the Clark Street car-tracks and wondered, as she did so, why they formed such a social Rubicon. Her other and Isabel never had any opinion of any one who lived west of Clark Street. It was the worst thing they had to say of Agnes.
