Boston Adventure
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 First edition | |
| Author | Jean Stafford |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Harcourt Brace & Company |
Publication date | 1944 |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 496 |
Boston Adventure is a 1943 novel by Jean Stafford.[1] It was her first published novel and was a surprise best-seller, launching her career as a writer.
Set shortly before World War II, it tells the story of Sonia Marburg, who grew up in Chichester, a small fishing village on the North Shore facing Boston. Deserted by her father and burdened with an insane mother, she dreams of life on the imagined splendor of Beacon Hill, a rich neighborhood in Boston. When she becomes the protegee of a wealthy Bostonian as a teenager her dream is achieved, but with it comes the revelation of an empty, decadent society.
Critic Marguerite Young at The Kenyon Review (Autumn 1944) found the novel appealing for its sophistication: “[W]ritten with incisive, painstaking delicacy, as if an insect recorded those minutiae which escape the average eye…a delightful novel.”[2]
New York Times reviewer Orville Prescott, commenting on the novel almost three years after its publication, compares it unfavorably to Stafford’s newly released novel The Mountain Lion (1947). Prescott considers Boston Adventure, though “impressive,” overrated by critics: “[I]mitative, overwrought, overstuffed with repetitious material and abusive rather than penetrating in its social satire.”
Reviewer Ruth Page at the New York Times (September 24, 1944) is impressed with the accomplishment of Stafford’s prose, delivering “imagery of symbolic value.”[3]