Olive: A Novel

Olive Rothesay enters the world cursed by her own mother's beauty and the cruel arithmetic of Victorian worth. Born with a spinal curvature, she is immediately deemed a deformity, a shame to her family, a dishonor to her race. Her mother Sybilla cannot bear to look at her. But the nurse Elspie loves her fiercely, and Olive herself will grow into something none of them expected: a painter, a woman who refuses to be erased. This is the story of a girl who must construct herself from nothing, who finds in art what the world denies her in love. Published three years after Jane Eyre, Dinah Maria Mulock Craik's radical novel is both answer and challenge to Brontë, asking what it means to be beautiful, to be worthy, to belong. At its heart is a question still urgent today: what do we owe the children we bring into the world, and what do they owe themselves?