Latchkey Ladies

Latchkey Ladies was first published in 1921, the first novel by the Canadian writer Marjorie Grant Cook. The novel opens in 1918 in the Mimosa Club, a women’s hostel in central London where young women office workers and ladies on declining incomes find refuge from the tedium of war work and the chilliness of impending poverty. Anne Carey is twenty-five, and works in an office where she is annoyed by soldiers harrassing her. She is engaged to a young lieutenant in the army, but she is bored of him and bored of the war. Her Mimosa Club friends take her to Bohemian parties where she meets models and artists, and then she meets Dampier. He is unlike anyone she has ever met before, and they begin an affair. Then, when he is holidaying with his wife and children at Easter, Anne realises that she is pregnant. What will she do?