The Chaperone

The Chaperone is a work of historical fiction written by American author Laura Moriarty and published in 2012. The novel portrays the Jazz Age of the 1920s in America through a feminine lens. It was inspired by historical people and events, primarily the 1920s silent-film actress Louise Brooks. Moriarty lives in Lawrence, Kansas, and the book is also partially set in Kansas. The Chaperone was adapted into a PBS Masterpiece feature film in 2018. This guide refers to the 2013 Riverhead Books paperback edition.

Plot Summary

The Chaperone is set primarily in 1922 but includes flashbacks to the late 1800s/early 1900s and flash-forwards to the 1950s and 1960s. In 1922, Cora Carlisle, a 36-year-old wife and mother from Wichita, Kansas, volunteers to accompany 15-year-old aspiring dancer Louise Brooks to New York City for the summer. Louise has been accepted to a summer session at a prestigious dance school there and dreams of becoming famous. Cora has her own reasons for wanting to visit the city: She grew up in a New York orphanage before being sent to Kansas for adoption and wants to find out about her birth family.

Cora undertakes the task of keeping the headstrong, unconventional Louise in line with 1920s notions of respectability while secretly investigating her own past. She discovers the identity of her birth mother, and they meet once. Her birth father abandoned her mother before Cora was born, and her mother makes it clear that she doesn’t want a relationship with her illegitimate daughter, crushing Cora’s hopes of developing a relationship with her long-lost parents.

Cora’s husband, Alan, is a closeted gay man, a revelation that results in a sexless marriage for more than a decade. Cora gradually realizes that she’s sexually frustrated, and she longs for a romantic connection. At the New York orphanage, she meets the home’s handyman, Joseph Schmidt, and the two become lovers. She brings Joseph and his young daughter back to her and Alan’s home in Wichita, where they all live together for decades. Louise is asked to become a permanent member of the dance company, and she stays in New York to continue her budding career. Cora and Joseph remain discreet lovers for the rest of their lives, and Alan’s lover spends time in the Carlisle home as well. Cora also becomes an advocate for birth control access and charitable assistance to unwed mothers. These changes in her life are the result of her increased confidence and self-knowledge, traits that she develops throughout the book. 

The Chaperone explores themes of sexuality, ambition, fame, changes in social expectations for women, racial equality, personal identity, and social influence during the 1920s in America. The dual settings of New York and Wichita allow Moriarty to explore both the urban progressiveness of a large city and the changes taking place in smaller Midwestern cities like Wichita.