Family Reunion

New York/London: Harper & Brothers. Near Fine in Very Good+ dj. 1933. First Edition. Hardcover. [nice clean copy with minimal shelfwear, a bit of dust-soiling to top of text block; jacket shows a bit of wear at ends of spine, one short closed tear and some minor diagonal creasing at bottom right corner of front panel]. Female-centric novel about a 70-year-old woman who hosts a skeleton-rattling family reunion, which very definitely revolves around the multiple generations of womenfolk, primarily: "her daughter-in-law Sylvia, dark and fiercely tender, whose whole life away from them is secret, and sweet to her, however precarious; the flippant, sensuous granddaughter Rosamond, who cannot be accompanied by her handsome husband because she no longer lives with him; another granddaughter, Harriet, beautiful and pure and strangely in love with a husband who must be dragged away from his fascinating canvasses; and the precise daughter Beryl, who surely has a counterpart in every family." (The old lady herself, thrice-married and considering a fourth, has a "most surprising secret [which] is dropped into the laps of her amazed family.") This author appears to have published just two novels, this one and "Late Flowering" the following year. The New York Times critic was impressed by the novel, calling its author "an excellent and zestful gossip who manages to amuse us constantly with her dry humor and her tart characterizations." Mrs. Owen, per her jacket bio, was a New Jersey native who had worked as a "copyholder" at the Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia as a teenager, prior to her marriage. .