Hilda Lessways

Hilda Lessways is a woman who refuses to be ordinary. In the industrial world of the Five Towns, where ambition in women is viewed as危险 (dangerous), she determinedly builds a career for herself as a shorthand clerk in London and Brighton. She is sharp, restless, and hungry for something beyond the narrow life that society has prescribed. Then she meets George Cannon, and her careful plans unravel. What follows is a disastrous bigamous marriage that leaves her pregnant, abandoned, and facing the ruins of her future. Yet Bennett, with his unsentimental eye and quiet compassion, offers his heroine something rare: a second chance. The novel follows Hilda's reckoning with her own choices and her tentative reconciliation with Edwin Clayhanger, the man who will become her husband in Bennett's earlier novel. This is a book about the courage it takes to start over, rendered in prose of remarkable texture and humanity.