SYLVIA’S MARRIAGE
A NOVEL
By Upton Sinclair
Author Of “The Jungle,” Etc., Etc.
London
SOME PRESS NOTICES
“The importance of the theme cannot be doubted, and no one hitherto ignorant of the ravages of the evil and therefore, by implication, in need of being convinced can refuse general agreement with Mr. Sinclair upon the question as he argues it. The character that matters most is very much alive and most entertaining.”—The Times.
“Very severe and courageous. It would, indeed, be difficult to deny or extenuate the appalling truth of Mr. Sinclair’s indictment.”— The Nation.
“There is not a man nor a grown woman who would not be better for reading Sylvia’s Marriage.”—The Globe
“Those who found Sylvia charming on her first appearance will find her as beautiful and fascinating as ever.”—The Pall Mall.
“A novel that frankly is devoted to the illustration of the dangers that society runs through the marriage of unsound men with unsuspecting women. The time has gone by when any objection was likely to be taken to a perfectly clean discussion of a nasty subject.”—T.P.‘s Weekly.
CONTENTS
SYLVIA’S MARRIAGE
BOOK I. SYLVIA AS WIFE
1. I am telling the story of Sylvia Castleman. I should prefer to tell it without mention of myself; but it was written in the book of fate that I should be a decisive factor in her life, and so her story pre-supposes mine. I imagine the impatience of a reader, who is promised a heroine out of a romantic and picturesque “society” world, and finds himself beginning with the autobiography of a farmer’s wife on a solitary homestead in Manitoba. But then I remember that Sylvia found me interesting. Putting myself in her place, remembering her eager questions and her exclamations, I am able to see myself as a heroine of fiction.
I was to Sylvia a new and miraculous thing, a self-made woman. I must have been the first “common” person she had ever known intimately. She had seen us afar off, and wondered vaguely about us, consoling herself with the reflection that we probably did not know enough to be unhappy over our sad lot in life. But here I was, actually a soul like herself; and it happened that I knew more than she did, and of things she desperately needed to know. So all the luxury, power and prestige that had been given to Sylvia Castleman seemed as nothing beside Mary Abbott, with her modern attitude and her common-sense.
My girlhood was spent upon a farm in Iowa. My father had eight children, and he drank. Sometimes he struck me; and so it came about that at the age of seventeen I ran away with a boy of twenty who work