The Smart Set: Correspondence & Conversations — Reading Notes

The Double Letter and the Social Lie

The most striking pattern in the excerpts is the use of paired letters that cancel each other out. In “A Letter of Introduction,” Mrs. Joslyn first writes a warm note introducing Mr. Hamilton-Locks to Mrs. Lemaire, then immediately sends a second letter confessing the introduction is a sham: “pay no attention whatever to it.” The young Englishman is a “bother,” forced on her by a traveling acquaintance. Yet Mrs. Lemaire’s reply reveals he has become a social success, “constantly at the P——’s,” with women “mad about him.”

This sequence exposes a layered dishonesty: the initial letter is a required form, the second is a private correction, and the third shows the correction is useless. The reader sees the gap between what is said and what is meant, and between what is meant and what happens. Fitch uses the epistolary form to dramatize how social currency—a letter of introduction—can be simultaneously issued and devalued by its own author.

Marriage as a Set of Separate Rooms

In the opening letter, Wm. H. Makeway mentions almost in passing that he and his wife Julia “haven’t shared the same room for years, not since the six months she spent with her married sister, Lady Glenwill.” The detail is dropped casually, but it signals a marriage of separate spheres: his bedroom is given over to male guests, his study becomes a smoker, and he is left “to hang around in any place I could find.”

This spatial arrangement recurs as a motif. The husband is displaced in his own home; the wife orchestrates the social event that causes the displacement. Fitch does not moralize, but the physical separation of husband and wife—and the husband’s resentment at being a guest in his own house—suggests a transaction: he pays the bills, she runs the show. The letter’s tone, half-admiring (“She is a wonder!”) and half-bitter, captures the ambivalence of a man who both respects and resents his wife’s social competence.

New York vs. Washington: Two Kinds of Society

Mr. Hamilton-Locks, the English visitor, writes to a friend in England comparing Washington and New York. He finds Washington “more like European without trying to be, while in New York they try more, and aren’t.” This observation, embedded in a private letter, crystallizes a tension running through the excerpts: the anxiety of imitation. New York society, in Fitch’s depiction, is self-consciously performative—it tries to be European and fails; Washington, by contrast, achieves a natural cosmopolitanism.

The same letter mentions Mrs. Joslyn’s introduction as a near-mistake (“I was so afraid I’d forget and use it by mistake”) and dismisses her as a social liability. The visitor’s perspective provides an external gauge: he sees the hierarchies and pretensions that the New York characters take for granted. Fitch uses the outsider’s voice to highlight the provincialism beneath the smart set’s sophistication.

Readers should attend to what is not said in these letters—the omissions, the afterthoughts, the letters that contradict earlier ones. Fitch’s characters are never fully reliable, and the gaps between their public and private selves are where the real story lies. The book rewards attention to small details: a dropped title, a changed salutation, a postscript that undoes the body of the letter. Treat each correspondence as a performance, and the collection as a backstage pass.

Fitch’s letters are the performance—the way we edit ourselves for someone, then whisper the truth to the mirror. That gap between what’s sent and what’s felt stayed with me for days. I found a similar quiet ache in Rose O'Paradise — Context and Discussion, the way a person’s private longing never quite fits the life they’re handed. It lingers like a room you’ve just left.