Miss Lulu Bett
Miss Lulu Bett is a
1920 novel by American writer
Zona Gale. The novel was also adapted into a stage play by Gale, which won the 1921
Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was a bestseller at the time of its initial publication, but gradually fell out of favor with changing tastes and social conditions.
The story of the novel concerns a woman, Lulu, who lives with her sister's family, essentially acting as a servant. She does not complain about her position, but is not happy. When her brother-in-law's brother, Ninian, comes to visit, there is a certain attraction between them. While joking around one evening they find themselves accidentally married, due to the laws of the state requiring little more than wedding vows to be recited while a magistrate is in the room for a marriage to count as legal. On learning this, Ninian and Lulu decide they actually like the idea of being married, and choose to stick with it. However, within a month, Lulu is back home, having discovered that Ninian was already legally married: 16 years prior he had wed a girl who left him after 2 days, and he had actually forgotten about the whole thing. Lulu considers this a reasonable story, but her brother-in-law, Dwight, insists that it would be a humiliation to the family to reveal such a thing, and insists that she tell everyone instead that Ninian grew bored with her and left her. Lulu is unable to see why this should be a less humiliating story, and begins to complain about her circumstances for the first time. She also notices that her teenage niece, Di, is unhappy, and also seems to be trying to use marriage as a way to escape her circumstance. Lulu eventually has to prevent Di from eloping, and is finally inspired to move out of her sister's home and live on her own. Soon after, she marries a friend of hers, a man named Cornish who owns a music shop.
A
1922 film which tells the story stars
Lois Wilson,
Milton Sills,
Theodore Roberts,
Helen Ferguson,
Mabel Van Buren and
Ethel Wales, and followed more or less the same plot as the novel.
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Free ebook of Miss Lulu Bett at
Project Gutenberg
