Until this fateful episode, the Zinns were not unlike other families with five marriageable daughters who settled in the Bloodsmoor Valley of Pennsylvania. But as young Deirdre sails off to infamy, the Zinn family has already begun a process of transformation that is as multifarious as it is extreme. In the world of A Bloodsmoor Romance , time machines run rampant, Transcendentalism gives way to the Spirit World, and decorum and etiquette fall to the exigencies of the passions. This is the tale our classics never dared reveal, the other side of Little Women as only Joyce Carol Oates can tell it. We know in life that people do get married, and some times it works out well.
People do fall in love.
There has been for many decades now a kind of obverse prejudice that a realistic novel ends un happily, that marriage is disastrous, and maybe that society bears it out. I know I really am very Romantic, and idealistic, and often sentimental. So when attacking the genre of a Romance specifically and trying to revitalize some of the old traits of plot and characterization, I think I was really giving way to a sense that maybe today we do need to revitalize Romance. At the same time of course there's a great deal that is playful about it.