Let Me Have Wings by Margaret Widdemer

If you are looking for melodrama, you will find it in abundance. The plot moves fast, but led by a ninny who needed to stand up on her own.

Rosemary led an idyllic childhood with her father and vibrant young mother (who married at just 16, escaping her domineering mother). It was a storybook life of love and safety when they were visited by her kindly grandfather at their country home. A wealthy banker, he has suffered being married to a paranoid neurotic and has found love outside of marriage with a widow. He would never leave his domineering wife, for she had a heart condition. Outwardly, everyone loved his wife's poise and charitable work, but in private, it made her feel superior to bully people, living simply to get her own way. After Rosemary was orphaned, and her grandfather died, she has to live with her grandmother, who portrays Rosemary to the town as an unlovable problem child, allowing her no social life and threatening her with reform school. When she turned 17, her grandfather's friend Judge De Koven was widowed, and her grandmother forces an engagement with Rosemary as a way of keeping her under her thumb. Her grandmother had another trick up her sleeve when she brought in a psychiatric doctor to declare Rosemary unfit and take her to an asylum. For the grandmother was the only one who knew that when her grandfather died, Rosemary inherited the full estate and would gain all the money when she turned 18 or married. Money is power.

Then Rosemary meets the new gardener Hendrick, a handsome blond Dutchman with tousled hair and gold stubble on his set jaw, and they undying love to each other within five minutes.

She wants wings. She wants to run away. Rosemary escapes to New York, where she finds that the psychiatric doctor is on her side, and he offers her a job in his clinic. He is caring and soon falls for her, proposing marriage (although he is married), and Rosemary agrees! Enter Hendrick, who kidnaps her to his winter cottage in the Hudson Valley, where a blizzard shuts them in for days. Nothing left to do but build a fire and get to know each other.

You might think that is enough drama, but there is more! The grandmother is a ruthless manipulator who loses her temper and demands her own way. I kept waiting for Rosemary to take control of her life, but she doesn't know her own mind. Someone could have looked into the grandfather's will and saved her 200 pages of strife. There is a lot of psychiatric talk about the roles of men and women in society, but I found it a fast-moving mess—albeit entertaining for an afternoon.

1941 / Hardcover / 311 pages