Pinkerton's Sister - Softcover

Trapped in a suffocating life of convention and party chatter, Alice Pinkerton has turned to the liberating worlds she finds in literature. Like a character from one of her favorite novels, Alice holds a biting, eccentric, but expansive view of life; she wears only white, has a stutter, and knows her peers call her a madwoman in the attic. Various period cures-hydrotherapy, hypnotherapy, electrotherapy, a sanitarium-fail to turn this thirty-two-year-old, highly imaginative, caustically funny woman into one of the silly damsels of 1903's New York Society. Hauntingly, beneath all this lies a dark family secret.

Pinkerton's Sister is a novel for readers, who will thrill to recognize a kindred in Alice's references to our most beloved literary characters: Jo March, Jane Eyre, Leo Bloom, and Hester Prynne, among many others, grace these pages. This intertextual, playful work certainly qualifies as "the ultimate book-geek's guilty pleasure" (Creative Loafing Atlanta).

For Alice Pinkerton, trapped in a suffocating life of convention and party chatter, 1903 New York Society is enough to make a woman mad?or at least a madwoman in the attic. So Alice escapes through the looking glass of literature, finding companionship and inspiration in Shakespeare, Wilde, Hawthorne, Stevenson, Poe, Austen, and the rest of the literary pantheon of her day. Like a character from one of her favorite novels, Alice holds a biting, eccentric, but expansive view of life, and through it all provides a tremendous portrait of her society?at once heartbreaking and wildly funny, intelligent and dazzling in its range.
Pinkerton's Sister is a true celebration of the imagination and a mesmerizing example of the saving power of fiction. Most of all, it is the quintessential novel for readers.

"Something of a cross between Harriet the Spy and Jane Eyre? Rushforth weaves Alice's often fastastical musings together with bits of the classics, popular novels, doggerel, and even advertisements for dentures and corsets. An epic inquiry into literature's role as an engine of interior life." -- The New Yorker

"Ambitious, intricate, moving." -- A.S. Byatt

"A gorgeous conundrum, the result of a lifetime of close reading-- and some 25 years of close writing." -- San Francisco Chronicle

"Pinkerton's Sister is a work of rare beauty and (rarer still!) genuine wit." -- The Believer
Peter Rushforth is also the author of KINDERGARTEN, which was published to much acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. A schoolteacher, he lived in North Yorkshire, England.