The Cords of Vanity: A Comedy of Shirking

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The Cords of Vanity (1920) is a comic romance novel by James Branch Cabell. Set in a world where history and fantasy collide, where the laws of chivalry and honor continue to hold sway in postbellum South, The Cords of Vanity is included in a series of novels, essays, and poems known as the Biography of the Life of Manuel. A man of honor and tradition, Robert Townsend comes from a prominent family whose wealth and power once depended on its ownership of slaves. Raised in a fast-changing world, in which the old agrarian way of life is being replaced in response to growing industrialization, Robert spends much of his time weaving tall tales. In dreams only, he lives up to the ideals of his ancestors, for whom honor was the most important thing of all. Set in a fictionalized version of Richmond, The Cords of Vanity is a captivating, hilarious tale of chivalry and romance inspired by the authors experiences as a young man raised in a family of Southern aristocrats. Originally written in 1909, before Cabell found success and infamy with the publication of Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice (1919), the novel is a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a young writer hungry for critical acclaim. Cabells work has long been described as escapist, his novels and stories derided as fantastic and obsessive recreations of a world lost long ago. To read The Cords of Vanity, however, is to understand that the issues thereinthe struggle for power, the unspoken distance between men and womenwere vastly important not only at the time of its publication, but in our own, divisive world. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of James Branch Cabells The Cords of Vanity is a classic of fantasy and romance reimagined for modern readers.

Author Bio

James Branch Cabell (1879-1958) was an American writer of escapist and fantasy fiction. Born into a wealthy family in the state of Virginia, Cabell attended the College of William and Mary, where he graduated in 1898 following a brief personal scandal. His first stories began to be published, launching a productive decade in which Cabell's worked appeared in both Harper's Monthly Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. Over the next forty years, Cabell would go on to publish fifty-two books, many of them novels and short-story collections. A friend, colleague, and inspiration for such writers as Ellen Glasgow, H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, and Theodore Dreiser, James Branch Cabell is remembered as an iconoclastic pioneer of fantasy literature.