BY CAITLIN FLANAGAN

In Kathryn Stockett's best-selling novel "The Help," young matrons barely out of their 20s attend weekly bridge-club meetings around tables that have been polished with lemon oil and set with Battenberg lace and heavy silver. Their households are filled with quiet luxuries: ironed sheets, freshly baked caramel cakes, bathtubs that are cleaned every day.

They are not wealthy women—one of them must make do with old furniture that she tarts up with slipcovers she makes on her sewing machine—but their lives are made gracious by the circumstances of their time and place. The novel is set in Jackson, Miss., in ...