The chaperone comic 3d2/15/2024 ![]() ![]() With Louise being the bubbly, obnoxious, carefree teenager, it was easy to think that Cora would be the stark opposite with a spotless background. On first meeting Cora in the book, one assumes she’s a well-bred woman of society who is happily married, enjoys ladies luncheons and teas, and has a keen eye on the world around her. That’s not including all the things she didn’t count on finding… Instead it focused on the life of Cora Carlisle, a proper married lady from Wichita, who accompanies Louise on her journey to New York but really goes to find truths, freedom, and a broader mind. Luckily for me, the book in no way took that turn. The fact that the name of the book is The Chaperone hinted to me that the story might involve Louise Brooks’ influencing her dowdy chaperone and introducing her to the big bad (beautiful) world of New York City. When one reads the name of Louise Brooks on the jacket of a book, one assumes that the book will be filled with tales of the glamorous silent movie star who went to seed too fast but remained proud and arrogant till her death. Over the course of Cora’s relationship with Louise, her eyes are opened to the promise of the twentieth century and a new understanding of the possibilities for being fully alive.ĭrawing on the rich history of the 1920s,’30s, and beyond-from the orphan trains to Prohibition, flappers, and the onset of the Great Depression to the burgeoning movement for equal rights and new opportunities for women-Laura Moriarty’s The Chaperone illustrates how rapidly everything, from fashion and hemlines to values and attitudes, was changing at this time and what a vast difference it all made for Louise Brooks, Cora Carlisle, and others like them. And while what she finds isn’t what she anticipated, she is liberated in a way she could not have imagined. Ultimately, the five weeks they spend together will transform their lives forever.įor Cora, the city holds the promise of discovery that might answer the question at the core of her being, and even as she does her best to watch over Louise in this strange and bustling place she embarks on a mission of her own. Young Louise, already stunningly beautiful and sporting her famous black bob with blunt bangs, is known for her arrogance and her lack of respect for convention. Cora Carlisle, a complicated but traditional woman with her own reasons for making the trip, has no idea what she’s in for. Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a thirty-six-year-old chaperone, who is neither mother nor friend. Only a few years before becoming a famous silent-film star and an icon of her generation, a fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks leaves Wichita, Kansas, to study with the prestigious Denishawn School of Dancing in New York. Turns out she has a good reason: she was actually raised in an orphanage there for a short while before being adopted by kindly midwestern farmers, and now wants to find her birth parents.The Chaperone is a captivating novel about the woman who chaperoned an irreverent Louise Brooks to New York City in 1922 and the summer that would change them both. When she hears that local pianist Myra Brooks (Victoria Hill) is in search of a chaperone to accompany her precocious but exceedingly talented teenage daughter Louise (Haley Lu Richardson) to New York to attend a prestigious dance school, Norma mysteriously jumps at the chance. When first met in 1922 in Wichita, Kansas, Norma seems like a nice, churchgoing lady of a certain age, respectably married to a lawyer (Campbell Scott) and mother of two practically grownup sons. ![]() ![]() Here, that parallax view is from the perspective of Norma – played by Lady Grantham herself, Elizabeth McGovern, taking a lead role for a change. Like so much of Fellowes’ work, it effectively flatters the viewer by assuming he or she must be familiar with certain historical figures (in this case, early cinema star Louise Brooks) and then appears to dish the dirt on them through the eyes of a character from another class or at least different social sphere. Written by Julian Fellowes, who brought us Downton Abbey and recent series The Gilded Age, and directed by Michael Engler, who worked on both the aforementioned, this based-extremely-loosely-on-fact costume drama adapted from a novel by Laura Moriarty should hit the sweet spot for fans of Fellowes’ particular variety of saucy-soapy period pieces. ![]()
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