This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. In a southern New England shore town where old money, memory, and modern development collide, Margaret Turner has bought a small house on the edge of the once-grand Lathrop property and built a life of hard-won independence. A mathematics teacher with a carefully maintained air of inherited dignity, she has spent nearly everything she owns to secure her future, knowing how easily older women can be dismissed, underpaid, and forgotten. Yet her solitude is shadowed by fatigue, class resentment, and the fear of becoming one of the discarded. That tension sharpens around Susan Lathrop Field, the beautiful, privileged woman whose fall from grace has become local gossip and public scandal. Margaret's old grievance against Susan is tangled with envy, pride, and the memory of a betrayal that shaped her life. As rumors circulate through servants, neighbors, and newspapers, Margaret is both appalled and fascinated, reliving childhood scenes, a defining act of kindness to an injured dog, and the painful realization that Susan's private life has become everyone's spectacle. Against a backdrop of broken piers, shuttered shops, and a fading waterfront, the novel traces the corrosive power of resentment, the ache of lost chances, and the stubborn dignity of survival.

À propos de l'auteur

Hull, Helen R.

Helen R. Hull, often remembered as Helen Rose Hull, was an American novelist and short story writer whose career flourished in the early and mid-twentieth century, a period when women writers were increasingly shaping modern literary culture while still pushing against social limits. Born in Ohio and educated at the University of Michigan, she went on to build a respected literary reputation through fiction that appeared in major magazines and through novels that examined the tensions between private desire and public duty. Her writing is especially notable for its clear-eyed attention to marriage, family life, work, and the emotional costs of convention, all rendered with a psychological subtlety that gives her characters lasting depth. Hull’s fiction often explores the quiet pressures placed on women, the search for identity within restrictive roles, and the complicated place of ambition and independence in everyday life, themes that still feel strikingly current in discussions of gender, labor, and selfhood. She earned recognition for her skillful realism and for bringing intelligence and empathy to domestic and social experience without sentimentalizing either. Today, Hull remains significant as a writer who captured the inner lives of ordinary people with honesty and restraint, offering readers a nuanced portrait of the choices and compromises that shape a life. Readers who enjoy thoughtful literary fiction, character-driven stories, and sharp observations about relationships and society are especially likely to appreciate her work.