With much sharpness but great empathy, Moriarty lays bare the settled mindset of this stolid, somewhat fearful woman-and the new experiences that shake that mindset up.”- San Francisco Weekly Brooks’s may be the novel’s marquee name, but the story’s heart is Cora’s. After a battle of wills, there’s a sudden change of destiny for both women, with surprising and poignant results.”- Entertainment Weekly“Throughout The Chaperone, her fourth and best novel, Laura Moriarty mines first-rate fiction from the tension between a corrupting coastal media and the ideal of heart-of-America morality.

But in Laura Moriarty’s engaging new novel The Chaperone, Brooks is just a hyper-precocious and bratty 15-year-old, and our protagonist, 36-year-old Cora Carlisle, has the not-easy mission of keeping the teenager virtuous while on a trip from their native Kansas to New York City. “With her shiny black bob and milky skin, Louise Brooks epitomized silent-film glamour. A mesmerizing take on women in this pivotal era.”- Vogue “In her new novel, The Chaperone, Laura Morirty treats this golden age with an evocative look at the early life of silent-film icon Louise Brooks, who in 1922 leaves Wichita, Kansas, for New York City in the company of 36-year-old chaperone, Cora Carlisle. In this layered and inventive story, Moriarty raises profound questions about family, sexuality, history, and whether it is luck or will-or a sturdy combination of the two-that makes for a wonderful life.”- O, The Oprah Magazine and how their unlikely relationship changed their lives. Agent: Tracy Fisher, WME Entertainment.“ The Chaperone is the enthralling story of two women. The novel, which in its final stretch races to 1982, attempts to portray Cora as a heroine buffeted by the bigotry and priggishness of the Jazz Age, but glosses over events and neglects the inner lives of many of its characters. Though what happens in New York gives Cora a new moral order, for the rest of her life she keeps it, too, a secret.

What follows for Cora is at first a letdown for the reader, and then highly dubious, given her naïve and conservative nature. What follows the trip for Louise is history: film stardom until the advent of sound. Cora keeps mum about her own childhood journey from the New York Home for Friendless Girls to a new life with an adopted family in Kansas, because she intends to search for her birth mother once she and Louise arrive. In the summer of 1922, prim, married Cora Carlisle chaperones a young Louise Brooks, the silent film star, to New York. Moriarty (While I’m Falling) skims the surface of 1920s life in Wichita, Kans., where homosexuality, contraception, and being just about anything other than white and Protestant is considered a moral offence.

The chaperone novel