A Woman of Means A Novel [Paperback]

Gerald Dudley is an executive at a hardware company in St. Louis, living the quintessential bachelor life with his young son, Quint. He is also a man who aspires beyond his means and class. When Gerald meets the wealthy divorc?e Ann Lauterbach and the two marry, life changes irrevocably for Quint. He enters a social world of private schools and debutante balls known to him only through his father's longings. As Quint's attachment to his stepmother and her means grows, her marriage to his father begins to crumble in small, subtle ways, which ultimately leads to larger, more devastating consequences.

Peter Taylor, the author of eight story collections, includingThe Old Forest and Other Stories(Picador) and three novels, includingA Summonsto Memphis, which won the Pulitzer Prize, andIn the Tennessee Country(Picador), died in 1994. A Tennessee native, he had lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife, poet Eleanor Ross Taylor.

An astonishing combination of clarity and subtlety . . . This brief novel moves with the quality of the best modern fiction. Chicago Sunday Tribune

InA Woman of Means, as in virtually everything else Taylor has written, the reader is transported into a place so faithfully similar to the real world, yet so imbued with a knowledge of it that none of us can hope to possess, that one is left breathless with admiration. Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

The mood of the novel, which is elegiac, and its style, which is spare and precise, are reminiscent of Willa Cather. The New Yorker

No description of mere mortals or events can indicate the particular kind of excitement it possesses . . . the excitement of being constantly on the verge of deep perceptions and deep interpretations. Robert Penn Warren, The New York Times