The Cords of Vanity

Robert Townsend, the narrator of this comedy of manners, is a charming and thoroughly selfish young Southerner who fancies himself a writer while drifting through flirtations he never means to honor. Cabell sets the story in his fictional Virginia town of Lichfield and lets Townsend confess, with disarming wit, to a long habit of shirking every duty and every woman who might have grounded him. The result is a portrait of vanity narrated by the vain man himself, funnier and more uncomfortable for being wholly unrepentant. Written in the same years as Cabell’s fantasies but planted firmly in the modern South, it shows the ironic voice he would carry into his better known romances. Presented here as a free PDF and EPUB edition.