Joy Street was published by Julian Messner in 1950 and marked a geographical departure for Keyes — from the New Orleans she had made her literary territory to the Boston Brahmin society of her own origins. The novel is set on Beacon Hill, the historic residential enclave that has been the physical and symbolic center of Boston’s aristocracy since the early nineteenth century, and it applies the same techniques of meticulous social documentation that characterized her Southern novels.
The protagonist is Emily Thayer, a young woman navigating postwar Boston society — its old families, its institutions (the Symphony, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Athenaeum), its rigid codes of behavior, and its subtle class distinctions that are as complex as anything in New Orleans Creole society. Keyes grew up in this world (she was born in Virginia but raised in Boston) and knows its rules intimately — the novel is as much a social anthropology as a romance.
The commercial success of Joy Street — it was a major bestseller and remained in print for years — demonstrated that Keyes’s appeal was not limited to her Southern settings. Readers responded to the same qualities that made her New Orleans novels successful: meticulous attention to setting, a large cast of socially precise characters, romantic plotting that moved at a deliberate pace through a richly detailed world.
Collecting Joy Street
First edition (Julian Messner, New York, 1950): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- Without jacket: $5–$10