The Smart Set: Correspondence & Conversations

This collection assembles short epistolary sketches and conversational pieces that satirize fashionable urban society through witty letters, social scenes, and theatrical observations. Recurring domestic correspondences, party reports, and salon exchanges lampoon manners, marital tensions, and the pursuit of status, while essays range from theatre and opera criticism to reflections on art, maternity, and grief. Tone alternates between playful irony and pointed social observation, using character voices to expose pretension, rivalry, and the rituals of entertaining. The pieces are varied in form but unified by their focus on social performance and the hypocrisies of polite life.