It's 1925, and Marjorie Dean is not at college to find a husband. She's there to work, researching and writing a biography of Hamilton College's founder, Brooke Hamilton. But college life has a way of complicating the cleanest intentions. Between sessions in the founder's study, Marjorie navigates friendships, social gatherings at Wayland Hall, and the charming attentions of her lively classmate Jerry Macy. As she digs into Hamilton's legacy with the help of Miss Susanna Hamilton (the great-niece herself), Marjorie finds that the past and present have a way of blurring. Is she writing someone else's story, or beginning her own? This is collegiate romance as the genre was originally imagined: not just boy meets girl, but young women claiming space in the world, balancing ambition with the heart's unpredictable demands. For readers who wonder what Jane Austen might have written had she attended university, this early 20th-century novel offers an answer.
