Elsie Lindtner is a woman at the "dangerous age" of forty-two in a society that values women only as marriageable items. After twenty-two years of comfortable but loveless marriage, Elsie divorces her husband and goes off to live alone on an island. But little by little her longing for solitude is tempered by the realities of loneliness and sexual deprivation.
First published in 1910 to raves and outrage, selling over a million copies and inspiring three films, The Dangerous Age created a sensation. Its author was, according to the New York Times, "simply the most talked of personality in Europe," and in time she inspired Colette, and befriended Bertolt Brecht and other artists fleeing the Nazi. Eighty years later, Karin Michaëlis's lost masterpiece remains as timely and compelling as the day it was written.
