Ask Alice combines two narratives, one beginning in 1904 in the emptiness of the American Midwest, the other in the muffled stasis of Edwardian rural England. The first follows the swift trajectory of Alice, a pretty orphan from Kansas who thinks ‘it must be fun to go places’. Alice, on the train shuttling between one set of backwoods relations and another, is waylaid by a predatory travelling salesman named Drouett; before long she really is ‘going places’.
Alice is an adventuress, a red-haired opportunist, a Becky Sharp without the wit. Her heart is set on the stage; the endless prairies of Dakota don’t augur well for such ambitions, so when Drouett abandons her there she latches onto a Lutheran missionary who at least takes her as far as Chicago, whence she soon escapes to New York.
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