Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier

Most famous for her novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier writes about women and their role in societies that keep them in pretty--and sometimes not so pretty--boxes. In Falling Angels, Chevalier gives us the story of the wives and daughters in two families in turn-of-the-20th-century London as Queen Victoria dies and the Victorian era dies with her. The story is told from several points of view as the daughters, Maude Coleman and Lavinia Waterhouse, grow up in an age when the old status quo of rigid etiquette for everything from "at homes" to dealing with servants to mourning clothes was all laid out in a book so that everyone knew the rules. The graying area between social classes, changing gender roles, conflicts of sexual and gender politics, questions of education, the fight for votes for women--all of these are played out between the two households, often near their adjoining plots in the nearby cemetery. This was the most recent book club pick for the South Park Book Club and encouraged hours of intense discussion, as well as the emptying of a few bottles of wine! The best thing about the book is the look it gives us--those of us who have grown up with certain rights and privileges and take them for granted--of how women from a not-so-distant generation lived.
Tiffani (honorary member from Dayton)