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Alice Duer Miller was 41 years-old, and had been married for sixteen years when she wrote "Come Out of the Kitchen!" as a serialised novel in Harper's Bazar (as it was spelled, then) in 1915. It was her seventh book, and her fifth novel.
Come Out of the Kitchen! is available elsewhere as a hard-copy facsimile reprint edition, or as a free download from the internet. But many details in the hundred-year-old novel are likely to be obscure to a modern reader unless some explanation is provided. Moreover, no biography exists of Alice Duer Miller, yet aspects of her life shed light on the narrative, satire, and humour in Come Out of the Kitchen! Later, after its publication, Come Out of the Kitchen! inspired a stage play, a theatre musical, silent movies, talkies, and film musicals. What were they? How were they different from the original story?
This edition is annotated, to explain the literary, geographical and historical obscurities. It also contains detailed information about Alice Duer Miller, and about the later incarnations of the story on stage and screen!
Come Out of the Kitchen! is a light-hearted romantic comedy. Nonetheless, while it was being serialised in Harper's Bazar (as this famous magazine was then spelled) in 1915 (starting in August 1915 to January 1916), war was raging around the world. From August 1914, Britain and her colonies, France and her colonies, Imperial Russia, Imperial Japan, and (from April 1915) Italy, were at war against Imperial Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Turkish Empire. Fighting occurred across Europe, Asia, parts of the Pacific, Africa, and in the oceans. Hundreds of thousands of men died during 1915 on the Western Front in France and Belgium, and on the Eastern Front. Tens of thousands died in 1915 in the disastrous attack at Gallipoli. Nearly two thousand civilians died in May 1915 when a German U-boat attacked RMS Lusitania without warning off the coast of Ireland. This disaster included the deaths of 128 Americans, and provoked a storm of outrage - not for the first time! across the United States, and eventually contributed to America declaring war on Germany in 1917. Perhaps surprisingly (or not? - Miller's older sister, Caroline King Duer, was a volunteer at the military hospital at Ris Oragis, a village between Paris and Fontainbleau and then worked in Paris at the American Fund for French Wounded) there is a passing hint of this global conflict in the novel.
It should also be noted that throughout 1915, and for preceding decades, women had been campaigning for suffrage, the right to vote. Women's rights were a major concern for Alice Duer Miller, and aspects of this arise, lightly, in the novel.
Let me end by suggesting that proper appreciation of Come Out of the Kitchen! demands familiarity with the American Civil War and the Confederate South, women's rights and suffragettes, Maurice Maeterlinck, fox-hunting, breeds of horses, the history of motor cars and nail polish and cigarettes and domestic refrigeration and American highways and tea-bags and ice-cream and record players, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Claudius's third wife, the meanings of "piazza", early tactics of submarines, Romeo and Juliet, Solon of Athens, Decadence, fancy painting, typhoid, the Mason-Dixon Line,... in short, this is a book that genuinely benefits from scholarly annotations!
And it is funny!
I hope this annotated edition will help stimulate interest in an almost forgotten world of light romantic comedy and social satire. I also hope it will revive awareness of Alice Duer Miller, an important figure in Twentieth century American literature, and in the history of feminism.
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