The Princess of 72nd Street

by Elaine Kraf

Literary Fiction

Feminist Fiction

160 Pages

"The Princess of 72nd Street is one of those books that feels like it was written specifically for you. Kraf renders Ellen's inner world with such vividness—I didn't want to leave it."

Synopsis

Ellen is a single artist living alone on New York's Upper West Side in the 1970s—sharp, sensitive, and periodically overtaken by what she calls her "radiances." During these episodes, she becomes Princess Esmeralda, and West 72nd Street transforms into her kingdom. The radiance is luminous and weightless, a liberation from the friction of ordinary life. Ellen doesn't experience it as illness. She experiences it as freedom.

The men around her see it differently. Threatened by Esmeralda and the autonomy she represents, they push back—with concern, with control, with the language of sanity deployed as a tool of containment.

Originally published in 1979 and celebrated by The New Yorker as a feminist cult classic, The Princess of 72nd Street was Elaine Kraf's final published work. It approaches its subject—mental illness, female selfhood, the cost of living outside expectation—with wit, invention, and a refusal to pathologize what it portrays. The result is a novel that is as provocative now as it was at its original publication, and long overdue for rediscovery.

Our Take

Kraf's great achievement is rendering Ellen's radiances from the inside without judgment or clinical distance. The prose during these episodes is genuinely beautiful—associative, sensory, alive with a logic of its own—and it makes the reader experience what Ellen experiences rather than observe it from a safe remove. That choice is both a formal and a political one: Kraf insists that Ellen's inner world deserves to be inhabited, not diagnosed.

The feminist critique embedded in the novel is sharp but never schematic. The men who seek to manage Ellen aren't cartoonish villains—they are recognizable in their discomfort, in the way freedom in a woman reads to them as disorder. Kraf captures that dynamic with precision and a dry, dark humor that keeps the novel from ever becoming a polemic.

Readers who loved The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath or The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood will find Kraf in essential feminist company. Also a natural pairing with Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks for readers drawn to compressed, interior portraits of women navigating impossible expectations. A quiet masterpiece that deserves to be read widely.