FICTION · FAMILY
Gwen Davis
Gwen Davis (born May 11, 1936) is an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, songwriter, journalist and poet. Davis has written eighteen novels, including the sexy bestseller The Pretenders. She has also written travel for the Wall Street Journal Europe, for online publications such as the Huffington Post, maintains a popular personal blog, Report from the Front, and a blog reviewing Broadway theater productions, Will Blog for Broadway. Please visit TheOnlyGwen.com to learn more about the author.
IT WAS THREE O'CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON, ON A beautiful but blowy day in mid-May, and I was, as usual, in the Earl of Cambridge's stable office talking with his head groom.
— from The pretenders, 1969
Most acclaimed
The pretenders
1969
When the rakish young Baron Reeve of Ormsby loses his shirt in a horse race, he asks his conservative uncle, the Lord Bradford, to give him access to his inheritance. The Lord agrees--if the young Baron will marry to add some stability to his life. Reeve enlists his childhood pal, Deborah, to "marry" him with the understanding that they will call off the wedding before the actual day arrives. They also promise to never, ever fall in love. But some promises were made to be broken.
Marriage
1818
Publisher's description -- Nearly everywhere and at all times, marriage has enjoyed a privileged status as the primary social unit -- the essential bond that created alliances between families and a bridge between the sexes. In joining a man and woman, marriage attempted to hold men to collective social standards, including responsibility for the women they impregnated and the children they fathered, while also stringently hedging in women's sexuality. In short, marriage has always demanded that both men and women sacrifice a considerable measure of individual freedom. In marriage, "I" becomes "we," and "we" frequently extends beyond the couple to extended family, clan, and society. For these reasons, both political and religious authorities typically have taken great care to present marriage as an institution to which individual interests must be subordinated. At the time of her death in January 2007, the celebrated historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese was worried that these attitudes were in the process of being reversed. In this book, which she was in the midst of preparing for publication at the time of her passing, she argues that marriage is disintegrating under the rising demands that it serve not the good of the whole but the desires of the individual. A union that at one point was used to limit individual "rights" is now claimed as one right among many. The sexual liberation movements of the last forty years have seriously undermined marriage, argues Fox-Genovese, so much so that the institution seems to face the threat of extinction. Even so, she writes, "Marriage for love -- the promise of an enduring and engulfing bond between a man and a woman -- is a dream that refuses to die. ... It still promises that we will finally be loved as we long to be loved." That dream is the ultimate theme of this book, a fitting coda to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's distinguished career.
Lovesong
1997
Seeking shelter in a Parisian cafe from a sudden rainstorm, John Patterner meets the exotic Sabiha and his carefully mapped life changes forever. John is like no-one Sabiha has met before - his calm grey eyes promise her a future she was not yet even aware she wanted. Theirs becomes a contented but unlikely marriage - a marriage of two cultures lived in a third - and yet because they are essentially foreigners to each other, their love story sets in train an irrevocable course of tragic events ...