Books like Elaine Dundy

Cassandra Edwards is as dazzlingly articulate as Sally Jay, but her wit is a weapon pointed in every direction, especially inward. She returns to her family home because her identical twin is getting married—an intolerable disruption to the private world the sisters have shared—and proceeds with virtuoso flair to resist the future.

Baker gives Cassandra the glamour of intelligence without pretending intelligence can save her from jealousy, loneliness, or self-sabotage. The result is funny, feverish, and unexpectedly piercing. Admired by writers including Carson McCullers and later revived as a neglected classic, it inspires the kind of fierce readerly devotion reserved for heroines who are impossible, wounded, and alive on every page.

Lorelei Lee is one of the great comic narrators: serenely practical, triumphantly acquisitive, and never once troubled by the gap between what she says and what the reader understands. Like Sally Jay, she moves through glamorous rooms by improvising a self—and makes female appetite feel not shameful but anarchically funny.

Published in 1925, Loos’s novel became a sensation and helped establish a whole tradition of deceptively light, female-voiced comedy. Its deliberately wayward prose is packed with jokes that arrive almost invisibly, while Lorelei’s supposed naïveté repeatedly proves more effective than male sophistication. Anyone who loves Dundy’s ability to hide ruthless perception inside fizz should read the book that made that trick immortal.