Book: Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers

Overview

Don Marquis’s 1916 book Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers is a brisk, satirical portrait of fashionable modernity at the height of the prewar and wartime craze for “advanced” ideas. The title character, Hermione, presides over a salon of earnest dabblers who devour every new metaphysical, aesthetic, and social theory with equal fervor and superficiality. Rather than a conventional novel, the work is a sequence of sketches and monologues that lampoon the period’s buzzwords, Futurism, Theosophy, psychoanalysis, eugenics, free verse, and “uplift”, and the social set that wore them like accessories.

Structure and Voice

The book unfolds as episodic vignettes originally honed in Marquis’s newspaper humor, which gives the prose a quick, conversational snap. Hermione’s voice dominates: breathless, half-informed, and rapt with capitalized Abstractions such as Life, Art, the Cosmic, and the Inner Self. She misquotes authorities, tangles jargon with sentiment, and ricochets from crusade to crusade without ever touching ground. The narrator and occasional interlocutors provide gentle counterpoint, but the comedy chiefly arises from Hermione’s own self-incriminating enthusiasms.

Characters and Setting

Hermione’s “little group” is a revolving ensemble of types rather than fully individuated characters: the soulful young poet, the intense reformer, the guru with a new system, the practical businessman dragged into aesthetic conversations, the society matron hungry for a cause. Their haunts are drawing rooms, lecture halls, tea shops, and studio apartments redolent of incense and earnestness. New York’s bohemian and social registers blur in these spaces, giving Marquis room to show how modernist postures and drawing-room faddishness cross-pollinate.

Themes and Targets

Marquis’s target is not modern art or inquiry as such but the social performance of depth. The sketches puncture the habit of converting hard ideas into moral and social cachet, a process that flattens both ethics and intellect. Hermione’s group talks about freeing the spirit while outsourcing its conscience; it praises science when scientific rhetoric dignifies prejudice, as in fashionable eugenic chatter, and celebrates “Nature” when it flatters the palate. The book also needles the commodification of sensitivity, where compassion becomes a boutique sentiment and art a lifestyle brand.

Humor and Style

The comedy hinges on diction, pacing, and reversals. Hermione’s diction mixes solemn generalities with cutesy diminutives; her sentences accelerate into gush and collapse into vagueness just where specifics would be compromising. Marquis lets jargon curdle into nonsense by simple, deadpan juxtaposition, spiritual ecstasy beside social snobbery, sexual candor beside prim evasions, radical talk beside utterly conventional practice. The sketches often end on a small, barbed anticlimax that exposes the gap between pose and reality.

Cultural Snapshot

The book is a time capsule of American urban modernity in its first flamboyant phase, when ideas arrived faster than digestion. Psychoanalysis, new spiritualisms, aesthetic movements, and social reforms all rushed into public life, and Marquis records how they were sampled, marketed, and misunderstood. War shadows the background, and its moral urgency occasionally pierces the chatter, yet even that becomes fodder for slogans. The satire is affectionate enough to be companionable and sharp enough to keep drawing blood.

Legacy

Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers stands as an early American send-up of the salon moderns, a counterpart to later parodies of café intellectuals. It showcases Marquis’s gift for character through voice and his keen ear for the period’s verbal tics. Beyond the period detail, the book endures as a study of how culture turns ideas into fashion, and of how fashion, in turn, empties ideas even as it keeps them circulating.