A tender Victorian novel about a girl caught between two worlds. Aldyth Lorraine was abandoned by her mother, left in the care of an aunt while her mother started fresh in Australia. Now she lives in her uncle's estate, navigating the complicated terrain of being a dependent relative among cousins who have everything. The Bland household is lively and warm, particularly her dear friends Hilda and Kitty, but Aldyth carries a wound that refuses to heal: the ache of being chosen last, of being the one who was left behind. When the charming new schoolmaster John Glynne arrives, he introduces Aldyth to literature and ideas that begin to reshape her understanding of herself and her place in the world. This is a novel about the quiet tragedies of childhood, the way education can be both liberation and another form of displacement, and the first, fragile stirring of love.
