Featuring a new introduction by Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Johanna Skibsrud.
There Are Victories is a proto-feminist anti-Bildungsroman that explores the intersections of misogyny, class, religion, and prejudice within upper class Anglo-Montreal and New York City society during WWI. Originally published in 1933, There Are Victories takes up the catastrophe of the home front and the ways in which the life—and happiness—of the novel’s protagonist, Ruth Courtney, is continually undermined by the bad behaviour of men.
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Charles Yale Harrison (1898–1954) was born in Philadelphia and raised in a Jewish family in Montreal. Harrison moved from Montreal to New York in the 1920s, where he worked on the staff of the Communist Party of America (CPUSA)-led magazine New Masses. Drawing on his own service in the First World War, he published Generals Die in Bed (1930), a scathingly anti-war novel about the horrors of trench warfare. The novel was well-received and was followed by the novels A Child is Born (1931), There Are Victories (1933), Meet Me on the Barricades (1938), and Nobody’s Fool (1948).
“Written in an exquisitely modulated manner that is admirably suited to its matter, Mr. Harrison’s novel is a delicate, penetrating study of a woman’s soul, crowded with dramatic incident and stripped of all the futile irrelevancies that make the usual novel such a trial to read.”—from the original dustjacket copy