Marguerite Verne; Or, Scenes from Canadian Life

In the waning hours of a New Year's Eve in St. John, New Brunswick, 1890s, Marguerite Verne moves through a world of gaslit parlors and carefully calibrated reputations. She is the thoughtful daughter in a household of ambitions: her mother schemes for advantageous matches, her sister Evelyn mirrors the self-absorption their mother deplores, and into this mix walks Mr. Phillip Lawson, charming, intriguing, possibly dangerous to Marguerite's peace of mind. Rebecca Agatha Armour captures something timeless about the tension between duty and desire. Marguerite possesses that rare quality of genuine compassion in a society that prizes appearance; she sees people clearly in a world designed for surfaces. The Verne household crackles with the small cruelties of familial expectation and the quiet resistances of individual conscience. What makes this novel endure is not merely its romance, but its understanding that self-discovery often means disappointing everyone who thought they knew you.