In the village of Ashleigh, Amy Neville gathers wildflowers on the edge of childhood, unaware that she is about to lose everything she loves. Her father is dead, her mother drowns in grief, and Amy must leave the only home she's known to become a governess, to become a servant in someone else's house so that her mother might survive. Mrs. Henry Wood, author of the sensation novel "East Lynne," returns to the terrain that made her famous: the domestic tragedy, the sacrificial daughter, the weight of Victorian expectation pressing down on women who have no choice but to obey. The early chapters linger in Ashleigh's beauty, in the poignant conversation between mother and daughter where love and reluctance intertwine. Amy is lovely and melancholy, caught between her own sorrow and her mother's need. To stay is to watch them both perish. To go is to abandon the only person who remains. This is a novel about the particular cruelties available to women in an age when duty and desire were irreconcilable.
