The Home-Maker

The arrival of full shelves of Persephone Books was one of the highlights of our year, so it seemed appropriate to close 2025 by choosing a Persephone book—in one of their slightly less expensive but still disarmingly handsome "Classic" editions—as our December Phinney by Post selection. The Home-Maker, a bestseller from the '20s, builds a wonderfully human story from its then- (and maybe still) provocative premise: what if a married couple realized that the wife was better—and happier—working outside the home, and the husband better—and happier—at home with the children? What is on the surface a realist novel of small-town American life becomes a kind of science fiction: a utopian thought experiment, and a moving one, for its awareness of how radically it challenged the rules of its (and, in some ways, our) society.