Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers was published by D. Appleton & Co. in 1916. The book collects newspaper pieces featuring Hermione — a wealthy, earnest, completely shallow young woman who moves through Greenwich Village collecting fashionable ideas the way other women of her class collect jewelry.
Hermione embraces suffragism, free love, Nietzsche, psychoanalysis, vers libre poetry, social reform, theosophy, vegetarianism, and every other avant-garde enthusiasm of the 1910s — not from conviction but from fashion. She does not understand any of the ideas she espouses; she merely likes the feeling of being advanced. Her “little group of serious thinkers” consists of similarly privileged dilettantes who mistake attendance at lectures for intellectual engagement and who use radical ideas as social currency.
Marquis’s satire is targeted not at the ideas themselves (he was sympathetic to many of them) but at their adoption as fashion accessories by people who have no intention of living by their implications. Hermione advocates for the working class but has never met a working-class person. She believes in free love but would be horrified by actual sexual freedom. She admires Nietzsche but has read only the titles of his books.
The satire remains effective because the phenomenon it describes — the appropriation of radical ideas by comfortable people who strip them of their radical content — is perpetual rather than historical. Every generation produces its Hermiones.
Collecting Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers
First edition (D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1916): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $30–$75
- Very good: $10–$30