The Art of the Wife and Other Stories

By: Lucia Bronder

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

As the turn of the twentieth century announced widespread social and political reform, women across countries, ages, relationships, and classes were reconsidering how their lives were structured.

The work of Lucia Bronder is one of the clearest answers to these questions in the American context. Writing under the pseudonym of Lilith Benda—a choice perhaps made because she was still living with her parents and writing was largely considered a profession unsuitable for women—little information is known about her other than that she was a Brooklynite of Polish-Jewish descent from a relatively prosperous family. Yet writing also indicates a familiarity with both New York’s literary circles and the political debates swirling around feminism and marriage at the time.

Bronder’s stories appeared almost exclusively in The Smart Set under the editorship of H. L. Mencken, who was attuned to her self- doubting tendencies. “She seems to me the most cunning newcomer that has bobbed up in a year past,” he wrote to poet and critic Louis Untermeyer in April 1916. “Unluckily, she is full of delusions that her stuff is very bad and it is a hard job to make her write at all.” Yet her subtly humorous and biting critiques of both marriage and the vapidity of American upper classes made for a perfect addition to the magazine’s roster, at times gracing its cover.