While Rinehart's comments on social issues would later be eagerly sought by the readers of mass market magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Ladies' Home Journal, in her early novels she concentrated almost entirely on plot and character. Yet The Circular Staircase is not devoid of an interest in the limitations of the author's own upper-middle-class environment. Its main character, Miss Rachel Innes, is a spinster, an anomalous figure in a society which saw wife and mother as the only acceptable roles for a woman. Most spinsters were financially dependent and condemned to stereotypically feminine (and low-paying) occupations such as teachers, nurses, shop clerks, and office workers.
The fictional Miss Rachel Innes is released from those constraints in The Circular Staircase and is free to use her intelligence and insight to unravel the.....
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