Depending on your age (and, doesn’t everything), your mother and aunts may have wafted through their days wearing these perfumes:

Shalimar
Chanel No.5
Arpege
Joy
L’Air du Temps
Je Reviens

And they might have read the following books. My mother surely did.

• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Quite good once you get past our heroine as milquetoast but Mrs. Danvers is to die for. See also Jamaica Inn by the same author.

• Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor
Local girl from England’s countryside makes good. Being banned in the U.S. didn’t hurt the book’s popularity.

• From Here to Eternity by James Jones
Could be subtitled: Manhood in War. Set in Hawaii just before and during the Pearl Harbor attack.

• Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini
Sumptuous adventure during the French Revolution, cruel duels, rabble-rousing, the quest for justice all in one well-wrought tome. See also Captain Blood (pirates!) by the same author. Mother read this one three times.

• Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart
Tasty Gothic suspense in which the comely English governess of a young French count must outwit evil to save her charge. See Mary Stewart’s Arthurian quartet, too, starting with The Crystal Cave.

• Hawaii by James Michener
Terrific saga in which New England WASPs and their god team up to save Hawaiians from themselves and their ungodly ways.

• Dinner at Antoine’s by Frances Parkinson Keyes
Could just as well be titled Murder at Antoine’s since Keyes gives us an exquisitely tragic mystery set in New Orleans in the late 1940s. Antoine’s still is there, even after Katrina.

• Giant by Edna Ferber
The soap opera that results when a well-raised young lady from Virginia marries into a rich Texas ranch family. You’ll never again ask “Where’s the beef.”

• On the Beach by Nevil Shute
An Australian Navy submarine is deeply submerged when WWIII explodes on top of the oceans; nukes are launched every which way; the end of the world, it would seem, except for them.

• By Love Possessed by James Gould Cozzens
Surprisingly trenchant tale of a mid-century, middle-class lawyer confronting realities in his small town. Why, it could almost be Peyton Place.

• Peyton Place by Grace Metalious
Like I have to say anything about this one.

• The Vixens by Frank Yerby
Saucy, naughty ladies and gentlemen make do in Reconstruction-era New Orleans. See also Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow.

• The Keys of the Kingdom by A.J. Cronin
Possibly the most replete do-gooder novel written thus far.

• The Silver Chalice by Thomas B. Costain
A humble silversmith is the hero of this novel set in Biblical Israel in the period after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ; this is how it’s done, Dan Brown.

• The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
Very likely how most 20th-century Americans first became acquainted with Chinese culture, for good and for ill.