Read This!: Years of Grace

By Margaret Ayer Barnes

The novel, The Violets of March, which I read mentioned this book numerous times so I decided to see what it was all about.

Years of Grace won the Pulitzer Prize in 1931. Starting at the end of the 19th century and going through the beginning of the 20th, this novel follows the life of Jane Ward from her early teens through adulthood. We see her as a love struck teenager, a semi-bored housewife on the verge of a love affair, and then older as a grandmother. Because so many years are covered, we see the change in views from Victorian to the Roaring 20’s, from Jane’s parents to herself to her children. We also see the change in Chicago from a sleepy town to one of the nation’s largest cities which parallels the societal changes taking place.

I thought, on taking up this book, that it would be a torrid romance based on what was described in The Violets of March. It was not. I did however enjoy the book for what it was. I thought Barnes did a fantastic job of capturing the progression of time and the nostalgia of looking back on your youth and how each generation thinks the one before it is too close-minded and “just doesn’t understand”. I also thought it was interesting that Jane was so normal with such a plain vanilla life. You don’t usually see that in the main character of a book. It was like nothing really happened to her but then when you looked at it so much did. It was really the story of an ordinary life.