Ann Vickers
Sinclair Lewis
 A Bildungsroman, the novel follows the heroine, Ann Vickers, from tomboy school girl in the late 19th Century American Midwest, through college, and into her forties. It charts her post-graduate suffragist phase in the early 20th century. As a suffragist, she is imprisoned, and her experiences there lead her to become interested in social work and prison reform. As a social worker in a settlement house in the First World War she has her first sexual love affair, becomes pregnant and has an abortion. Later, having become successful running a modern and progressive prison for women, she marries a dull man, more out of loneliness than love. Mired in a rather loveless marriage, she falls in love with a controversial (and perhaps corrupt) judge. Flouting both usual middleclass convention as well as that of her progressive social circle in New York, she becomes pregnant by the judge, and has a son.