The Safe Bridge was published by Julian Messner in 1934 and is set in the world Keyes knew best: Washington, D.C., political society during the early New Deal years. The novel follows a senator’s wife — a figure Keyes could draw with absolute authority — as she navigates the social upheavals that Roosevelt’s New Deal brought to Washington: new money, new people, new politics disrupting the established order of the capital’s social hierarchy.
The “safe bridge” of the title is metaphorical: the bridge between public and private life, between duty and desire, between the political world and the domestic world that a political wife must maintain. Keyes’s protagonist must be simultaneously a political helpmate (entertaining, networking, supporting her husband’s career) and a private person with her own needs and desires — a tension that Keyes understood from personal experience.
The novel’s documentary value is considerable: it captures the feel of Washington social life in the 1930s — the dinner parties, the cocktail receptions, the careful placement of guests, the coded language of political conversation — with the precision of a trained observer. Keyes was not writing from the outside; she had lived this life for nearly two decades, and the novel’s authority comes from that lived experience.
Collecting The Safe Bridge
First edition (Julian Messner, New York, 1934): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $25–$60
- Without jacket: $5–$10