Fran returns to Old Swithinford only to discover that her childhood memories of placid village life have been transformed by discontent and a struggle between progress and tradition.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Marshall's entertaining first novel, set in the 1960s in the secluded town of Old Swithinford, England, is a solid historical romance. While most of the locals are obsessed with adhering to centuries' worth of convention, Fran Catherwood, a 40-ish widow who's moved back to Old Swithinford after working as a TV scriptwriter in America, manages to shed her "self-spun cocoon of Victorian morality," though only after considerable soul-searching. Fran, always outwardly proper, decent and forgiving, privately struggles with repressed anger toward her histrionic, seductive friend, Johanna; with repressed desire for her married step-cousin William, who shares her feelings and her home; and with the fear of malicious gossip from small-minded townsfolk about her untraditional, if still innocent, living arrangement with him. Marshall is largely effective in conveying the burden Fran shoulders, caught between an old world resistant to change, but which she loves nonetheless, and a new world of progress that may bring women's liberation but is epitomized by the entrepreneurs who want to turn an old manor house into a hotel. Curiously, the energy Fran directs toward Johanna can sometimes seem more erotic than that directed toward William, who, while a gentlemanly British academic, has a disturbing side ("You didn't know how near you came to being raped, that night," he teases Fran). Even so, the author limns a sympathetic protagonist whose self-analysis is perceptive and complex.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Miss Budd, Hen Street, Jack Bartrum, Bryony Cottage, Old Swithinford, Eeyore's Tail, Hector Birch, Madge Ellis, Mary Budd, Pamela Thackeray, Bill Edgeley, Jean Howe, George Bridgefoot, Johanna Brooke, Ned Merriman, Monastery Farm, Monty Ellington, Ernie Ambrose, East Anglian, Loddy Thackeray, Jelly Bean, Uncle William, Lady Day, Pam Balls, Michael Thackeray Browse Sample Pages:
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landing window Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Miss Budd, Hen Street, Jack Bartrum, Bryony Cottage, Old Swithinford, Eeyore's Tail, Hector Birch, Madge Ellis, Mary Budd, Pamela Thackeray, Bill Edgeley, Jean Howe, George Bridgefoot, Johanna Brooke, Ned Merriman, Monastery Farm, Monty Ellington, Ernie Ambrose, East Anglian, Loddy Thackeray, Jelly Bean, Uncle William, Lady Day, Pam Balls, Michael Thackeray Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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