I was beguiled by the cover and the title and happy to find that I loved the story. It reminded me of The French Lieutenant's Woman and, to a lesser degree of A.S. Byatt's Possession, partly because of the setting -- Victorian England -- and partly because of the tangle of emotions amongst the characters -- a widow whose loss has set her free to reclaim her own identity anda clergyman struggling to reconcile his love for a charming, consumptive, and increasingly mad wife with his growing attraction to the widow. That's just one triangle. There's a whole cast of fully realized supporting characters, equally entangled -- the widow's autistic son; her companion who is a budding socialist; the physician who attended her husband and is enamored of her; the physician's wealthy friend who falls for the companion . . . it goes on and on -- like life. But this is no soap opera -- it's a beautifully written and imagined account of a time when the beliefs and mores of the world were in flux. Highly recommended. The NY Times has an excellent review HERE.
