This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Miss Hannah Mole is a companion with a razor-edged wit, a stubborn independence, and a talent for turning embarrassment into adventure. When a small deception frees her from Mrs. Widdows' suffocating sitting-room, she wanders through Radstowe's evening streets and discovers a city alive with lamps, mist, old houses, trams, and river light. The grandeur, shabbiness, and absurdity of the place stir both her imagination and her memory, revealing a woman who survives by irony, self-respect, and an inward life rich enough to transform hardship into meaning. At a tea shop, Hannah's comic reunion with her cousin Mrs. Spenser-Smith exposes their sharp differences over class, duty, and respectability, while also hinting at Hannah's precarious position and possible dismissal. Yet even with work uncertain, she refuses self-pity, meeting anxiety with coffee, teasing, and practical improvisation. The novel also deepens her emotional world through her fascination with Mr. Blenkinsop, whose reserve, kindness, and moral struggle draw her into teasing, thoughtful intimacy. As Radstowe's seasonal beauty frames her longing for beauty, company, and a place to belong, Hannah emerges as a heroine of intelligence, vulnerability, and quiet defiance.

À propos de l'auteur

Young, Emily Hilda

E. H. Young, born Emily Hilda Young in 1880 in Yorkshire, grew up in the world of a large clerical family and came to fiction after an early life shaped by education, domestic responsibility, and a keen observation of social manners. She married late, lived through the changing expectations of women in the early twentieth century, and began publishing at a time when English fiction was expanding beyond Victorian certainties into more psychologically alert and socially nuanced territory. Young became especially admired for her subtle, intelligent novels of character and community, in which she explored the private lives of women, the pressures of class, the disappointments of marriage, and the quiet battles between duty and desire. Her work is distinguished by delicacy of style, emotional precision, and an unsentimental sympathy for people trying to make a place for themselves in restrictive social worlds. Across her fiction, she returned to questions that still feel urgent today: how women negotiate independence, how families shape identity, and how ordinary lives contain hidden acts of courage. Though once less celebrated than some of her contemporaries, she is now increasingly valued as a perceptive chronicler of female experience and social change. Readers who enjoy finely observed domestic fiction, psychologically rich character studies, and novels that reveal the drama beneath everyday life will find her especially rewarding.