It seems an idyllic sort of place with an orderly main street and a host of respectable-seeming residents. Peyton Place is a fictional New England town ‘book-ended’ by two churches of different Christan denominations. It was also made into a film not long after the book was published in 1957 which I need to get my hands on! I think it must be a generational thing, because although I had never heard of it,my Dad mentioned that there was a TV series of the same name which was popular in the 1960’s.
Peyton Place (although recently re-printed with this lovely cover by Virago Books), was actually published way back in 1956. A more mature and wiser Allison realizes that she could never find true happiness by destroying Lewis' marriage.I would never have even thought of reading this book if it hadn’t been for Simon of Savidge Reads, who having heard great things about it, suggested we read it together for a bit of a rogue book read while on our woodland weekend away. The crisis over, Mike is reinstated at the school, Selena is reunited with Lars, and Ted is reconciled with Raffaella when he finally stands up to his mother. Allison and Lewis are present when Connie publicly stands by her daughter and denounces Roberta Carter as a hypocritical bigot. Events come to a head when a town meeting is called to discuss Rossi's defense of the controversial novel. Emotionally upset, Raffaella races to the ski slopes and nearly causes herself to have a miscarriage. Meanwhile, Roberta has finally succeeded in driving her daughter-in-law out of the house. Allison's mother, Connie, shocked by her daughter's exposé of the town's citizens, becomes enraged when her husband, school principal Mike Rossi, is fired because he refuses to remove the novel from the school library. Hounded by her lurid past, Selena Cross is unable to face her lover, ski instructor Lars Hedlom.
When the novel is published, many townspeople are outraged, particularly Roberta Carter, a domineering and snobbish woman determined to wreck her son Ted's marriage to his Italian-born wife, Raffaella. Young Allison MacKenzie, who is called to New York for the final editing of her first novel (a thinly disguised case history of the residents of her hometown of Peyton Place), falls in love with her publisher, Lewis Jackman, an older married man.
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