She Walks in Beauty

“Quite on a level with…Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, and Muriel Spark.” 
—Edmund Wilson, The New Yorker

“She is wittier than Dorothy Parker, dissects the rich better than F. Scott Fitzgerald, is more plaintive than Willa Cather in her evocation of the heartland and has a more supple control of satirical voice than Evelyn Waugh, the writer to whom she’s most often compared.”
—The New York Times Book Review

Dawn Powell’s She Walks in Beauty recounts the adolescence of Dorrie and Linda, two sisters who live in a railroad station boarding house owned by their Aunt Jule in a small Ohio town. The story’s cast of characters includes gently venal theater actors, the town gossip, a penurious piano teacher, eccentric alcoholics, not quite respectable women, philosophical “old man Wickley,” and town golden boy Courtenay Stall, among others. A tale of class society, ambition, longing, and coming of age, She Walks in Beauty is a taut, merciless, and psychologically astute portrait of pre-World War I life in small town America. This Warbler Classics edition includes a detailed biographical timeline.

Dawn Powell (1896–1965) was a prolific American novelist, playwright, and short story writer known for her biting social satires. Although she gained a degree of critical success in her lifetime and earned the respect of fellow writers such as Ernest Hemingway (his “favorite living novelist”), E. E. Cummings, Gore Vidal (“our best comic novelist”), and J. B Priestly, her work was not fully appreciated until well after her death.