Summary
A kinetic fresco of silk and ambition, Our Mrs. McChesney stitches the restless heartbeat of 1918 commerce to the whale-bone corset of American propriety. Emma McChesney—petticoat peddler, road-warrior, single mother—glides across depots and hotel lobbies, her sample-case rattling like a Gatling gun of gabardine and tulle. When the benevolent patriarch T. A. Buck expires mid-handshake, his callow heir—equal parts spreadsheets and spineless—nearly torpedoes Featherbloom into oblivion. Emma, courted by a glib rival magnate, hovers on the brink of defection until filial melodrama yanks her back: Jack, her Princeton-groomed son, elopes with a shimmying chorine, forcing Emma to confront the chasm between maternal blueprint and adult chaos. In a gambit equal parts couture and coup d’état, she drafts a skirt that flares like a comet, drapes it on her now-polished daughter-in-law, and catapults the brand from insolvency to ubiquity. Love, once a ledger entry, finally balances when the junior Buck—chastened, galvanized—confesses that the firm’s true asset is the woman who never needed saving.
Synopsis
Mrs. Emma McChesney is a determined and successful traveling saleswoman for T. A. Buck's Featherbloom Petticoat Company. When Buck dies and his son, T. A. Buck, Jr., takes charge, the company suffers and Emma nearly accepts a job offer from Buck's rival, Abel Fromkin. On her last sales trip, however, she learns that her son Jack has married chorus girl Vera Sherwood, and because Buck demonstrates such concern for the boy, Emma decides to remain with him. Distraught that Jack has married so young, Emma sends the bride away to boarding school while Jack takes a job with the company. Later Emma discovers that the firm is approaching bankruptcy, so she invents a new skirt which, as modeled by Vera and promoted by Jack, rocks the fashion world and saves Buck's company. Having fallen in love with Emma, Buck proposes and she accepts.
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