The Price She Paid

The Price She Paid is a novel by the American journalist and novelist David Graham Phillips, published in 1912 after the author was killed in 1911 and often grouped with his works on women's social circumstances. The novel opens with the death of Henry Gower, a wealthy man in the town of Cliffside near New York: generous and well-liked in life, he was in fact self-serving throughout, leaving neither enough property for his wife and children nor any real provision for their future. After the funeral, the widow and children discover the family is far less well-off than they imagined, and their respectable life is at risk. Daughter Mildred, raised from childhood to "marry well" and possessing no means of earning a living beyond beauty and social graces, must confront the tangled relationship among marriage, money, and self-worth, and gradually fight for her place under pressure. Starting from the family's decline, the novel depicts the price and wear a woman pays for independence and dreams in an era of extremely limited opportunity, and through her choices examines contemporary social expectations and restrictions on women. The English original is in the public domain, with English reset editions and e-books in circulation; the Chinese title is The Price She Paid.