Unlock Now Love And Mrs. Sargent Engineered By Virginia Rowans Released Through Publication

wasn't surprised to discover, when I checked Eric Myers' biography of Patrick Dennis, Uncle Mame, that the story of Love and Mrs.
Sargent had originally intended for the stage, The book reads very much like a novelization of a stage play, withunusual for Dennisan extremely limited cast, distinct acts, and dialogue that reads like a script.


Love and Mrs, Sargent, the last of the four books Dennis wrote under his female pseudonym of Virginia Rowans, works best if it's imagined in the context of the film director Douglas Sirk.
The novel has all the elements of a Sirk midcentury melodrama I suspect it's no coincidence that it was imagined and written a year after the release of Imitation of Life.
Like that film, it features a mother who gives her all in order to provide the best for her children, only to have them turn against her.
As in All that Heaven Allows, it features a torrid and maybe even inappropriate romance between a socialite and a much younger man.
Despite its comic secondary charactersMrs, Flood manages to be both batty and touching at the same timeit's definitely a melodrama, with the glummest ending ever featured in a Patrick Dennis novel.


And perhaps the melodrama that drives the novel would have worked better on the stage, or in a filmed version the last half of the novel, in which Mrs.
Sargent's faults are laid bare, reads less like a Patrick Dennis novel and more like rant against Mom and apple pie, It's a screed in which everything Mrs, Sargent has done is shown to be hypocritical and blindly selfserving, If it weren't so readable, I'd swear the author was working out some of his own mommy issues,

But the book is compulsively readable, even more so than some of his more widelyknown and easilyavailable works, It's fun to see some of the touches here that appear in later Dennis novels, The terrible novels that Mrs, Sargent's son, Dicky, writes hereone novel that hints at the character's latent homosexuality, and another set in France with funny bidet storiesare both mocked by theme in Dennis' much superior Tony, several years on.
Dennis' reallife chum Christine Jorgenson, the first widelyknown recipient of genderreassignment surgery, makes a cameo appearanceand perhaps even exists as a sly commentary on the author's moonlighting with a female pseudonym as he continued to write books under his more masculine pseudonym of Patrick Dennis.


Love and Mrs, Sargent would prove to be the last of Dennis' four Virginia Rowans novels it proved to be

an acerbic amusebouche for a decade of acid satire that was to come.
Mrs. Richard Sargentrespected widow, envied socialite, the most widelyread advice columnist in America, the nicest and most conservative woman aroundis such a success that not only is she in talks for her own television show, but she's soon to claim the jewel of her crown, the coveted Mother of the Year award.


When a muckraking reporter from a liberal magazine spends several days in her household, however, he discovers that Mrs, Sargent's two adult children would prefer any mother other than their ownand when the reporter moves into Mrs, Sargent's bedroom, he discovers she's anything but respectable,

Love amp Mrs, Sargent is the last of four novels Patrick Dennis wrote under his other pseudonym of Virginia Rowans, .