by Lori Swick
Comfort and Mirth offers a rare glimpse into the capital city of Texas during the early decades of the twentieth century and brings into play the formation of the Texas suffrage movement, Prohibition, the treatment of the mentally ill, and the first round of controversies over the Jim Crow laws.
This novel traces a young woman’s journey of self-discovery and the struggle for empowerment. Camille Abernathy leaves her home in Seattle to move to Austin with her worldly new husband who has accepted a position as professor of philosophy at the University of Texas. As she devotes herself to the tasks required to create a home of ease and elegance for her husband and her children, she is drawn into a whirling social circle of professors’ wives and introduced to the world of urban opulence and hypocrisy. Through the letters she writes to her mother, Camille unravels the complexities of her new life by trusting in her natural instincts and relying on her greatest innate strengths—depth of philosophical and spiritual wisdom.
