Escapade

In 1913, at the age of nineteen, Elsie Dunn - later to be known as Evelyn Scott - turned her back on the genteel Southern world she was born into and ran off to Brazil with a married Tulane University dean more than twice her age. Living in tropical exile under assumed names, the couple produced a son and endured a grueling series of hardships and failures that would provide Evelyn Scott with the raw material for a singular work of fictionalized autobiography. That work, published in 1923 amid expressions of mingled outrage and admiration from the critical establishment, was Escapade. While offering a chronicle of the runaways' Brazilian interlude, Escapade is a tale both literary and autobiographical, filled with striking imagery and written in a style that is audacious and extraordinary modern. Indeed, in many ways the book anticipates Scott's 1929 modernist masterpiece The Wave, widely considered to be one of the greatest Civil War novels ever written. Though present-day readers are unlikely to be shocked by the adulterous liaison depicted here, they will find much of interest - and much to admire - in this spare but beautiful account of one woman's daring rejection of the mores of her time.