In Glamour in Glass, Mary Robinette Kowal takes the Jane Austen plus magic set up of Shades of Milk and Honey and extends it by throwing her heroine Jane into marriage and the middle of a looming war. I enjoyed the action/mystery aspects of the novel as well as the advances in the magic system/worldbuilding, but what I appreciate most about Glamour in Glass is how Kowal captures the emotional drama of the early days of a marriage.
In particular, she is spot on in how she illustrates the intensity and uncertainty that couples experience as sex, the annoyances of daily living together, and the feeling out of priorities and shared goals come into play. There’s a certain fragility in that stage of a couple’s relationship — a fragility that comes from the emotional amplification and the stripping away of illusions (heh.) that occurs after marriage. This is, of course, especially true in a society like that in the Glamourist Histories where men and women interact in rather constricted settings and social conditions prior to marriage.
All of that fraughtness is made all the more delicious by the fact Jane and Vincent are not only lovers and companions, but also professional and artistic peers. And that the gender notions of the time complicate how they are able to work together as glamourists and, perhaps more complicated, how they represent that relationship to the rest of the world. Both of them, because of their social classes and educations, can pass in high society, but can never fully be inside it. They are genteel bohemians, fringe insiders, polite artists.
In short: they have a lot to deal with. Their honeymoon trip to Belgium is supposed to give them space to work through some of that, but the bubble newlyweds start out in is all too soon popped as the political situation becomes strained and rumors of Napoleon’s return from exile swirl.
All of this potentially tasty narrative tension would be useless, though, without Kowal’s ability to pick the right details and the right emotional states to dramatize Jane and Vincent’s journey through the early parts of their marriage. I won’t go into detail because of spoilers, but as one might expect, it has a lot to do with keeping secrets, fear of exposing oneself fully to one’s spouse, privacy and seeing (and mis-seeing) how the spouse sees you and others and him or herself.
Jane and Vincent are master illusionists. In Glamour in Glass, Kowal plays with both the literal glamours that Jane and Vincent work and the illusions all new couples have of each other, themselves and what their life together will be like. It’s a realistic portrait of a young marriage, and it’s what, above all, makes the novel work.