Roast Beef, Medium (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): The Business Adventures of Emma McChesney

By Edna Ferber

Roast Beef, Medium follows the adventures of Emma McChesney—a divorced, independent, traveling saleswoman for a skirt and petticoat company. The stories, originally published in American Magazine between 1911 and 1913, brought Ferber her first big success. She went on to publish two additional volumes of Emma’s adventures and adapt them into a Broadway play.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Mar 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781411446670

Reviews for Roast Beef, Medium (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

[bjace_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Emma McChesney, the heroine of Roast beef, medium is a single mother with a teenaged son who makes her living as a travelling saleswoman. Despite a professed longing for a home life, she is a business woman to her fingers and she progresses despite the difficulties of the road--bad food and conditions, illness and the competition, which is occasionally malicious and conniving. Emma has a hearty, Girl-Scoutish tone and you can almost imagine her being played by Ginger Rogers or Jean Arthur in one of those Thirties comedies. The story was fun and it's interesting to see that the life of the working mother doesn't change much.

[vivienner_3 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Reminiscent of an old Hollywood movie, Emma McChesney is a fast-talking travelling petticoat sales"man". She is divorced and plans to put her teenage son through college with her earnings. Being mindful of the risks involved in competing with male sales reps has not made her become hardened or any less professional. Still, she knows what to expect in a restaurant pie or stew and stays with the reliable "roast beef, medium".Written in 1913, Ferber gives the reader an idea of what life was like for business women in the early 20th century.

[jaylia3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Savvy, straight-talking, and self-reliant, Emma McChesney, is as witty and entertaining as the “fast-talking dames” found in old movies, but it’s closer to 1910 than 1930 or 40. Emma’s an early career woman, working as the Midwest sales representative for T.A. Buck’s Featherloom skirts and petticoats, and most of her life is spent on the road--traveling by train, sleeping in hotels, meeting the most interesting people, and outsmarting the male sales reps who are her competition. She’s still stylish and attractive enough to make a man hope, but as a hardworking divorced mother dependant on her income she’s a stickler about her reputation.Roast Beef Medium is the first of three books about the adventures of Emma McChesney. Edna Ferber, also the author of Giant and Show Boat, wrote the McChesney books long enough ago that they’re all in the public domain and ebook copies of them can be downloaded from sites like Project Gutenberg. I listened to a wonderfully narrated Libravox recording, also free, which kept me grinning even when stuck in traffic.