Rona Jaffe (1931–2005)
Forfatter af The Best of Everything
Om forfatteren
Rona Jaffe was born in Brooklyn, New York on June 12, 1931. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1951 and began her writing career as an assistant editor at Fawcett Gold Medal Books in 1952. Her first novel, The Best of Everything, was published in 1958 and was later adapted into a film starring vis mere Joan Crawford. Her works include Class Reunion, The Room-Mating Season, The Last Chance, Family Secrets, The Cousins, Five Women, and Mazes and Monsters. During the late 1960s, she was hired to write cultural pieces for Cosmopolitan. She founded The Rona Jaffe Foundation, which presents annual awards to promising women writers of literary fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction including the Rona Jaffe Prizes in Creative Writing at Radcliffe and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Awards. She died from cancer on December 30, 2005 at the age of 74. (Bowker Author Biography) vis mindre
Serier
Værker af Rona Jaffe
The Pale Horseman 1 eksemplar
Recent History 1 eksemplar
Reunion 1 eksemplar
The Last Chance, After The Reunion 1 eksemplar
Associated Works
The Best from Cosmopolitan — Bidragyder — 4 eksemplarer
Satte nøgleord på
Almen Viden
- Kanonisk navn
- Jaffe, Rona
- Fødselsdato
- 1931-06-12
- Dødsdag
- 2005-12-30
- Køn
- female
- Nationalitet
- USA
- Fødested
- Brooklyn, New York, USA
- Dødssted
- London, England, UK
- Dødsårsag
- cancer
- Bopæl
- New York, New York, USA
- Uddannelse
- Radcliffe College
- Erhverv
- editor
novelist - Organisationer
- Fawcett Publications
- Kort biografi
- Rona Jaffe, a lifelong New Yorker, grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She was working as an editor with Fawcett Publications in 1958 when she published her first novel, The Best of Everything, which became a bestseller and was later adapted into a film. The novel electrified readers and reviewers with its authentic description of the struggles of ambitious, intelligent women in the working world and in their relationships with men. She was the author of 16 books, many of which also became bestsellers. She founded The Rona Jaffe Foundation, which presents annual awards to promising women writers of literary fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction.
Medlemmer
Anmeldelser
The tale of a group of young women whose lives intersect in the typing pool of a 1950 New York publishing house works as both an entertaining exercise in chick lit and a socio-economic investigation of gender and sexual inequality in midcentury America - which is actually intentional, Jaffe confides in the foreward that appeared in my version of the novel.
The girls represent a variety of socio-emotional archetypes: a brainy, ambitious college graduate (Christina), a naive small town girl eager to make her way in the big city (April), the single mother (Barbara), the aspiring actress (Gregg), the shallow, gossipy office manager (Mary Anne). As the story progresses, their lives intertwine with the lives of various men, also representing common archetypes, to include a buffoonish office predator (Mr. Shalimar), a self-loathing alcoholic (Moss), a privileged, arrogant socialite (Dexter), a prep school good guy (Paul), a small town sweetheart (Eddie), a bohemian (likely bisexual) theater producer.
Intentionally or otherwise, what all the subplots have in common is that they provide a lens for examining the uncomfortable relationships that form in a society that offers few alternatives for women other than marriage. In almost every case, the women are forced to tolerate unequal relationships - preyed on by their bosses, forced into sex (and abortions) by demanding boyfriends, courted by married men, led to believe that it is their obligation to flatter the uninteresting men and fix the broken ones. One reads on, hoping our protagonists will eventually find their power (or at least their self-esteem), but the end of the novel is, at best, ambiguous - perhaps reflecting that, at the time this was written, we were still struggling as a culture to identify what constitutes affirmative female sexual agency. (Lest it sound like I'm being too hard on the men in this book, I'm not: in the real world, it may be that many men found these relationships as oppressive as the women did, but that's not something Jaffe explores here.)
If the idea of learning more about the publishing industry intrigues you, just a heads up that you won't find what you're looking for here, the publishing house setting being mostly a pretense for entangling the various storylines. The storytelling is respectable if repetitive - every chapter starts out with a bit about New York street life and/or the weather - and there are lots of those "hi, how are you?" conversations that take up page space without contributing to the plot. But the midcentury ambiance - smokey lounges with names like "The Red Room," boozy cocktail parties, girls in smart sheath dresses and lads lining up for jobs in their fathers' firms - is enjoyably authentic, and the relationships feel distressingly convincing.
Found this to be an interesting bit of time travel - a reminder that while we may have convinced ourselves in the 1950s that we had achieved the height of modernity, our ideas about gender equality had a long way to go, leading to so much unnecessary exploitation and pain.… (mere)
The girls represent a variety of socio-emotional archetypes: a brainy, ambitious college graduate (Christina), a naive small town girl eager to make her way in the big city (April), the single mother (Barbara), the aspiring actress (Gregg), the shallow, gossipy office manager (Mary Anne). As the story progresses, their lives intertwine with the lives of various men, also representing common archetypes, to include a buffoonish office predator (Mr. Shalimar), a self-loathing alcoholic (Moss), a privileged, arrogant socialite (Dexter), a prep school good guy (Paul), a small town sweetheart (Eddie), a bohemian (likely bisexual) theater producer.
Intentionally or otherwise, what all the subplots have in common is that they provide a lens for examining the uncomfortable relationships that form in a society that offers few alternatives for women other than marriage. In almost every case, the women are forced to tolerate unequal relationships - preyed on by their bosses, forced into sex (and abortions) by demanding boyfriends, courted by married men, led to believe that it is their obligation to flatter the uninteresting men and fix the broken ones. One reads on, hoping our protagonists will eventually find their power (or at least their self-esteem), but the end of the novel is, at best, ambiguous - perhaps reflecting that, at the time this was written, we were still struggling as a culture to identify what constitutes affirmative female sexual agency. (Lest it sound like I'm being too hard on the men in this book, I'm not: in the real world, it may be that many men found these relationships as oppressive as the women did, but that's not something Jaffe explores here.)
If the idea of learning more about the publishing industry intrigues you, just a heads up that you won't find what you're looking for here, the publishing house setting being mostly a pretense for entangling the various storylines. The storytelling is respectable if repetitive - every chapter starts out with a bit about New York street life and/or the weather - and there are lots of those "hi, how are you?" conversations that take up page space without contributing to the plot. But the midcentury ambiance - smokey lounges with names like "The Red Room," boozy cocktail parties, girls in smart sheath dresses and lads lining up for jobs in their fathers' firms - is enjoyably authentic, and the relationships feel distressingly convincing.
Found this to be an interesting bit of time travel - a reminder that while we may have convinced ourselves in the 1950s that we had achieved the height of modernity, our ideas about gender equality had a long way to go, leading to so much unnecessary exploitation and pain.… (mere)
1 
Dorritt | 36 andre anmeldelser | Jan 23, 2024 |
Dorritt | 36 andre anmeldelser | Jan 23, 2024 | 
This was so frickin’ bland! I read it because I was fascinated with her from reading (what else) Mazes & Monsters. It was so plain, so devoid of anything, so blank, that I became fascinated by it. Not too long ago, I remembered that I had seen some reviews of her other stuff and that a few people had enjoyed that work. So, I decided to give her another chance, especially when I found this book and found that it was autobiographical. Well, it was a quick read, it’s not like her structures or style are complex or anything like that.
The first chapter had built up a little narrative energy which kept me reading but this is instantly evaporated away as each chapter is an unrelated self-contained short story episode of her life, any momentum potential is gone when a chapter ends. And the book actually gets increasingly bland as you read through to the end. So much so, that the final chapter is told in the third person. It’s about her giving her husband an STD from her having an affair with a promiscuous married man. Had it been in first person like the rest of the book, it might’ve made a decent conclusion to the book, but no, she squandered that potential as well.
That is another thing about this memoir, it is palpably guarded. The author seems to want to talk about everything but clean it up so it’s not too embarrassing or too revealing. Her toeing the line makes it all just frustrating and boring. She comes off as a total prude whenever she talks about sex especially about the boys she was “in love” with in college, all of whom turned out to be “secret homosexuals”. One of the two points of interest in the book. The other is the first chapter’s childhood game of “Ritz Top Torture Academy”.
This book sucked just like Mazes & Monsters, its fragmented, Rona Jaffe’s prose is so utterly effaced of style and so dismally bland that it transcends vanilla becoming a monotone beige. Although, there is a single insight into her uninteresting method:
Some things in life you cannot ever change, and given the chance, with all the powers of a wicked and hungry mind, you do not want to change them, for as they are is the way they were meant to be. [pgs.148-149]
No wonder her characters are so static and one-dimensional.
I don’t care what anybody else thinks, I’m never touching another book or anything else bearing the name Rona Jaffe on it. I can only imagine that her best work is only mediocre. Hell, she barely even mentioned her writing, how these chapter-long episodes affected her work, or about any of her work up to the time of the book’s writing, just that she wanted to become a writer and became one; more than likely just to spite a doctor she was dating who didn’t like the idea of her being a writer at all. That’s it, the last bit of interest this book holds at all, it’s just plain boring.
I might be a little angry that I read this book.… (mere)
The first chapter had built up a little narrative energy which kept me reading but this is instantly evaporated away as each chapter is an unrelated self-contained short story episode of her life, any momentum potential is gone when a chapter ends. And the book actually gets increasingly bland as you read through to the end. So much so, that the final chapter is told in the third person. It’s about her giving her husband an STD from her having an affair with a promiscuous married man. Had it been in first person like the rest of the book, it might’ve made a decent conclusion to the book, but no, she squandered that potential as well.
That is another thing about this memoir, it is palpably guarded. The author seems to want to talk about everything but clean it up so it’s not too embarrassing or too revealing. Her toeing the line makes it all just frustrating and boring. She comes off as a total prude whenever she talks about sex especially about the boys she was “in love” with in college, all of whom turned out to be “secret homosexuals”. One of the two points of interest in the book. The other is the first chapter’s childhood game of “Ritz Top Torture Academy”.
This book sucked just like Mazes & Monsters, its fragmented, Rona Jaffe’s prose is so utterly effaced of style and so dismally bland that it transcends vanilla becoming a monotone beige. Although, there is a single insight into her uninteresting method:
Some things in life you cannot ever change, and given the chance, with all the powers of a wicked and hungry mind, you do not want to change them, for as they are is the way they were meant to be. [pgs.148-149]
No wonder her characters are so static and one-dimensional.
I don’t care what anybody else thinks, I’m never touching another book or anything else bearing the name Rona Jaffe on it. I can only imagine that her best work is only mediocre. Hell, she barely even mentioned her writing, how these chapter-long episodes affected her work, or about any of her work up to the time of the book’s writing, just that she wanted to become a writer and became one; more than likely just to spite a doctor she was dating who didn’t like the idea of her being a writer at all. That’s it, the last bit of interest this book holds at all, it’s just plain boring.
I might be a little angry that I read this book.… (mere)
There's just nothing happening! So much padding and fluff, so much description - where are the things that happen?!
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Statistikker
- Værker
- 23
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- 4
- Medlemmer
- 1,869
- Popularitet
- #13,772
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- Anmeldelser
- 63
- ISBN
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- Sprog
- 10
- Udvalgt
- 3
Most of the men in the book are lecherous, cheating, abusive, and utterly oblivious to the emotional needs of the young women they wine and dine and bed (if at all possible), and the women, unfortunately, seem to have the collective savvy one might expect of a reasonably bright 16-year-old today.
Characterization, of the women at least, is rich and detailed, and Jaffe creates a picture of the energy, the possibilities, and the power of the city her characters have set out to conquer. There’s an awful lot of boozing here, and all the characters smoke constantly – again, a reflection of the times and the social milieu of the setting. The outrageous sexual discrimination and harassment of the workplace is presented as perfectly normal and something one simply must learn to manage in order to survive. Still, for all the depth and quality of the writing itself, many of the situations are now sad clichés – the dissolute playboy, the philandering husband, the unwanted pregnancy, the emotionally abusive artiste. Contemporary reader may be forgiven for occasionally thinking (or even saying) “Oh, for godsake, girl, dump this loser and get on with your life.”
For all that, the book is worth a read, if only as a measure of how far the feminist movement has come, and – given the immediate recognizability of many of the situations – of how far it still has to go.… (mere)