Mrs. Bridge

In 117 brief episodes, it tells the story of an upper middle-class, bourgeois family in Kansas City in the period between the First and Second World War, mostly from the perspective of the mother, the Mrs. Bridge of the title.

Mrs. Bridge and her family are forced to deal with the changing habits and morality of the America of that time, especially in the areas of civil rights and gender equality.

Mrs. Bridge's life revolves around her children and much of it plays out in the home and in and around the country club, in a social environment whose primary values are "unity, sameness, consensus, centeredness".

[4] Writers and critics, however few, continue to praise its sensitivity and importance; Tom Cox, in The Guardian, writes that it is "one of the sharper novels about mid-20th-century domestic life".

[10] British critic Matthew Dennison (who praised the "studiedly simple, undecorated prose, with few rhetorical flourishes") compared the main character to Jan Struther's Mrs. Miniver; both inhabit "an interwar world shaped by a promise of certainties — domestic, social, cultural and sexual — which are never wholly realised and remain frustratingly elusive".

[11] The book over the years continues to be taught in universities as part of modern literature, creative writing (the vignette) and social and cultural theory curriculums.