Reviews for The Real Adventure (Large Print Edition)

The average rating for The Real Adventure (Large Print Edition) based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-05-20 00:00:00 Patrick Meyer I only finished this wretched book because I was hoping against hope that the protagonists would come to their senses. It was pretty racy for its time (1916) with its cursing men and smoking women, unfaithful spouses, references to Freudian psychology, and the idea of marital sex as unpaid prostitution. There's even a reference to homosexuality on pg. 462. Millionaire Rodney Aldrich meets and falls madly in love with the beautiful co-ed, Rose Stanton. Rose has had a very simple, middle-class upbringing, marked by her mother's involvement in the suffragette movement. Rose's mother has been grooming her to take her place in "The Great Cause" of women's rights and is disappointed when she marries Rodney. Rose's feminist leanings quickly cause her marriage to unravel. She thinks her husband only appreciates her as a lover and not as a friend. After her babies are born she leaves home to "find herself" because, obviously, only after having a career, can her husband respect her as an equal. Oddly, the whole time she is on this quest for self-actualization and financial independence, she pines for him and his love. Only when he comes crawling back to her on his knees, apologizing for his sexual cravings, saying that he will take her back on her terms and never make any demands on her at all, does she decide to come back. Am I the only one who sees this as a new version of inequality, with the woman calling all the shots? This is a thoroughly dreadful book that tries to make maleness an ugly trait and female selfishness a noble one.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-03-18 00:00:00 Les Dotson Of the half-dozen or so books by Webster that I've read, my favorite is this one, a bestseller in 1916. I kept thinking I knew what would happen (come on, 1916: surely some conventions would be followed) ... and I never did. I just reread it, and loved it again. The sense of life of the main character and quite a lot of her explicit ideas match mine. Premise: a beautiful, intelligent young woman falls in love with a handsome, intelligent, productive man, marries him - that's the original "adventure" - then realizes that she wants to be his intellectual partner rather than just the woman he makes love to and indulges. How can she go about changing the situation? That's the second adventure. The resolution is damn near perfect