The Bride's House

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First Published In 1929, The Bride's House is the story of a woman who loves two men but who ill find happiness with neither. The novel is set shortly before the turn of the century in rural Ohio. Even as a young girl Sophie True love was carrying on a struggle within herself between "the good" and "the bad", between the conventions of her time and place and her own restless and passionate nature. This romantic impulse seemed to be in her blood, shared with her aunt Lotta who had followed her heart, but at a cost. Sophie is determined to do otherwise and makes the conscious choice to embrace "the good" when she marries the kind and steady Lynn Hamilton. He builds her a bride's house, but when the burning, if slippery, Jerome Gardner arrives in town and invades her life, Sophie's best intentions are undone.Sophie is a complex and self-aware woman, and a strikingly contemporary figure to be found in a novel written nearly sixty years ago. In his introduction to The Bride's House, Powell's biographer Tim Page suggests that the novel may also have autobiographical underpinnings, that Sophie's conflict and her ambivalence could have mirrored Powell's, who, at the time she was writing the book, was coming to see the limitations of her own marriage, and was possibly involved in a love affair with the radical playwright, John Howard Lawson.