Miss Macintosh My Darling

by Marguerite Young · 1965

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965) is a sprawling, 1,198‑page American novel that blends picaresque adventure, psychological depth, and magical realism. The narrative follows Vera (Catherine) Cartwheel, an opium‑addicted recluse, on a hallucinatory quest to locate her lost nursemaid, Miss MacIntosh, a figure of common sense and reality. Through a kaleidoscope of dream‑like vignettes, the book explores illusion versus reality, utopian longing, feminist concerns, drug addiction, and the fragmented nature of identity, all rendered in richly poetic, incantatory prose. It is celebrated as one of the longest single‑volume novels in English and a modernist epic of American life.