A Glowing Future is definitely a story for women who have been badly treated by men. Maurice is portrayed as uncaring and selfish right from the start. He contacted Betsy just twice while he was away in Australia; the first time was to beg her to stay faithful to him and the second was to ask if he could come and stay. At no point did he tell her that he had met someone else and was going to marry her. Betsy therefore presumed that he had come back to her for good and Maurice perpetuated this myth by sleeping with her on his first night back. The next day, he told her the truth. The reader’s sympathy therefore immediately goes to Betsy. She is distraught and behaves hysterically, but it is completely understandable and therefore very realistic.
The descriptions of the ornaments that Maurice is planning to give to Patricia are vivid. This drives home the agony that Betsy is feeling as she watches Maurice pack away things that she has treasured for so long and are now going to another woman. All of this builds up through the course of the story, so that by the end, the reader is longing for Maurice to get his comeuppance.
Fortunately, he does, in a rather gruesome way.
The first time I red the story, I was waiting for this sort of end.
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign conducted a series of studies to try to determine why women were more attracted to crime books and why. Their research found that given a choice between books about crime and a war or gang book, a greater percentage of women would pick the crime book, compared to men.
Women Drawn to True Crime Stories
The presumption was that men, being more aggressive by nature, would be more likely to find such gory topics as rape and murder more interesting than women.
But their two-study research show that women overwhelmingly chose true crime books give the same choices as men.
The researchers then conducted