WASHINGTON SQUARE

Washington Square is an unusually compact novel which deals with the interrelation of four upper middle class characters. In essence, it is about a young woman who is inexperienced in the ways of the world, neither conventionally clever nor beautiful, wooed largely because of her financial expectations. Although she is by no means unintelligent or without spirit, she is manipulated by two men and a mature woman who has succumbed to the patriarchal values of late victorian society. The book is intriguing in that it explores de growing awareness of the subjugation of women and the necessity for their emancipation, and is, in the words of Graham Greene, `perhaps the only novel in which a man has successfully invaded the field and produced a work comparable to Jane Austen´s´.