According to this list of bestselling books of the first decade of the twentieth century, Unleavened Bread by Robert Grant was one of the bestselling books of 1900. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, also published in 1900, was not a best seller. Still, the books have much in common. Unleavened Bread is “the story of a woman who abandons her moral standards in her search for prestige and dominance.” Sister Carrie is the story of a girl who abandons her moral standards in her search for money and a life of ease. I suppose Sister Carrie is the darker of the two novels, but both stories dealt with the pressures of getting and maintaining one’s societal status, and both stories implied that money, ease, and acceptance into high society were common, if unworthy, goals for many young women coming of age around the turn of the century.

I don’t think the “getting into society” goal is quite so common or tempting nowadays. But wealth and power and luxury are all still quite alluring. The ending of Unleavened Bread was quite unsatisfactory. Our heroine, or anti-heroine, Selma, connives her way from poverty and obscurity to power and fame, and at the end she enjoys the beatific vision of her husband as he makes his acceptance speech after being elected to the U.S. senate.

Selma heard the words of this peroration with a sense of ecstasy. She felt that he was speaking for them both, and that he was expressing the yearning intention of her soul to attempt and perform great things. She stood gazing straight before her with her far away, seraph look, as though she were penetrating the future even into Paradise.

The End. Oh, by the way, the senator sold his vote and cheated, with his wife’s encouragement, to get the office. But, all’s well that ends well–or not.

A couple of other quotes from the novel:

“A seven mile drive is apt to promote or kill the germs of intimacy.” That’s a drive in a horse drawn carriage or wagon. I would say the same of a five day road trip through West Texas.

“He had chosen as a philosophy of life the smart paradox, which he enjoyed uttering, that he spent what he needed first and supplied the means later; and the the same time he let it be understood that the system worked wonderfully.”
I doubt that system would work for long for anyone who wasn’t already supplied with at least some of the “means.”

Unleavened Bread reminded me of Sister Carrie, of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, and of Main Street by Sinclair Lewis. It’s about the thirst for power and popularity, about the Midwest rubes meeting the Eastern establishment, and about the slow but steady dissolution of a woman’s ethical standards in her quest to become rich and fashionable.

You can read Unleavened Bread online at Project Gutenberg.