Fielding’s Folly was published by Julian Messner in 1940 and is set in the Virginia hunt country — another of the distinctive American social worlds that Keyes documented with ethnographic precision throughout her career. The novel follows a New England woman who marries a charming but feckless Virginia planter and must rescue both his failing estate and his failing ambition through her own intelligence and determination.
The “folly” of the title is double: Doña Fielding — the estate itself — is a literal architectural folly, a grand house built beyond the family’s means; and the marriage is the protagonist’s folly, a choice made for love rather than prudence that she must justify through sheer force of will. Keyes’s sympathies are clearly with the practical Northern woman rather than the charming but irresponsible Southern gentleman, and the novel can be read as an argument for female competence within the constraints of a social system that officially denies it.
The Virginia horse-country setting gives Keyes material for her characteristic social documentation: the hierarchies of the hunt, the economics of horse breeding, the architecture and agriculture of Virginia plantations, the social rituals of a landed class that maintains its traditions despite declining fortunes. The novel sold well and confirmed Keyes’s commercial viability after the success of The Great Tradition.
Collecting Fielding’s Folly
First edition (Julian Messner, New York, 1940): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Without jacket: $5–$10