A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies
Pantheon, 2007
It’s winter in Boston, 1900. Charlotte Heath, young, independent, and a wife who’s fleeing her husband and a stultifying life, checks into a hotel where she knows the cook.
It is not a hotel in the usual sense of the word. It’s Victorian America, plus adventures, plus everything I knew about imagination, sexual politics, and Boston, my home for many years.
Charlotte has no idea what she’s about to find out–and not only about the secret part of the hotel, which means that women guests have the option of requesting the company of a man, literally a brothel-in-reverse. Which she decides to say yes to. She finds her own self. She finds her own history. She has a wonderful time, in a sort of “Alice in Wonderland” way, until it’s time to be back in reality, transformed. It’s a comedy: unreal but also a work of things that are essentially true, which to me is the real job of fiction.
Writing this novel began with me on a walk in Boston, pausing by a building on Beacon Hill, staring at it, imagining it in another time, when it was new, and then starting to ask the basic question, “What if…”
Praise & Reviews
“Oddly charming. A.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“A sharp-eyed novel of erotic awakening circa 1900. . . . Cool comfort from a writer with style and heart.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
“An upbeat, even old-fashioned story about personal growth, telling us we can’t know where we are until we remember where we’ve been.”
—Boston Magazine
“Charlotte Heath is the most enticing heroine I’ve met in some time: tenderhearted yet obstinate, genteel yet deeply sensual. The adventure she takes us on is wonderfully eccentric, deliciously observed, and ends with the kind of gratifying surprise that reminds me why telling stories, and reading them, is such an essential pleasure in my life.” —Julia Glass, author of Three Junes
“Full of earthy characters and situations you hate to leave. . . . A delightful and intriguing read.”
—Historical Novels Review
“A delightful look at Victorian New England. Charlotte Heath, 30 years old and coming-of-age, is a joy!”
—Book Sense
“Charlotte is very much like the precariously imaginative Catherine Morland of Jane Austen’s exquisite Northanger Abbey.”
—Anniston Star
“These revels are done with wit and gaiety, along with a grain of chastening sense. Like Shakespeare’s ‘A Winter’s Tale,’ Cooney’s tale moves its characters with allure.”
—Boston Globe