Private Life by Jane Smiley

336 pages

Pulitzer Prize winning author, Jane Smiley's latest book is set in the late 1800s and early 1900s. We get a glimpse at marriage during that time. Margaret Mayfield narrowly avoids the stigma of "old maid" by marrying Captain Andrew Early, an astronomer, teacher, deep thinker, and eccentric. She becomes his cook, driver, helpmate, and typist. She slowly comes to dislike her husband and the entire idea of being married, and she develops her own group of friends including a Japanese family that gets scooped up in the internment following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

I didn't enjoy the characters very much, but I did like learning more details about events during this time in history.