Book To Read on a Train, Maybe

The name of the book is "A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies". The author is Ellen Cooney, which might be her real name. What's your best guess?

I googled her. She grew up in Massachusetts, outside of Boston (but not that far - not that anything is really far from anything else in MA) so her intimacy with the landscapes and stratified small towns a person rolls through on the way from one side of the state to the other are part of her basic body of information.

What do you think the book is about?

Short version: Red-haired, impulsive (was that redundant?)Charlotte, who married up then spent a lot of time miscarrying and compromising her immune system finally recovers from something like polio, only to discover her husband lustfully smooching some full-bodied lass in the midst of a snowbank on a public street. All this happening in the 19th century, in a small industrial MA town. Wife runs away to Boston to shelter with someone who used to cook for husband's family and now cooks at a hotel on Beacon Hill. Not just an ordinary hotel, pay your money and get a room. Of course not. A very special place for very particular ladies.

Who turns up as a resident but her husband's aunt, who is also the doctor who told Charlotte what she had was "brain fever". What is she doing there, given that she and her husband own a house less than a mile away and she works at the local hospital? Shortly, Charlotte realizes that all these beautiful young men she keeps running into in the hall are "available". Soon, she avails herself of the availability, experiences passion and decides to go back to her rule-ridden husband.

Issues of class and education are raised, dangled and dropped. Charlotte's awakening is so partial that she doesn't get time enough to become an accomplished courtesan. All the interesting stuff about who she really came from and where she might go with that is blanketed under a need to have rewritten this puppy four or five more times, putting the back story to use soon enough so the reader gives a rat's patootie what happens to this naif.

Occasional good descriptive writing. Someday this Ellen Cooney will put her historical material to better use.