Old Valentines: A Love Story

Phyllis Oglebay inherited two things from her mother Valentine Germain: a name wrapped in theatrical legend and a heart too tender for the cold world her uncle Sir Peter has built around her. After losing both her parents to tragedy, Phyllis grows up under her uncle's rigid roof, where art is suspect and passion is dangerous. Then she meets John Landless, a poet with neither money nor pedigree, and everything her uncle has tried to crush in her begins to bloom. This is a story about what survives when everything is taken: the way love plants itself in the ruins of grief, the tension between duty and desire, and whether a young woman can choose her own future when her family has already written her story. Havens writes with quiet intensity about the small rebellions that constitute a life, the memories that shape us more than present circumstances, and the stubborn persistence of feeling in the face of propriety.