The Heart of Rachael

Rachael Breckenridge has everything society insists a woman should want: a handsome husband, a beautiful home on Long Island, a stepdaughter to mother. Yet on a bright April day at the country club, watching the golfers and hearing the idle chatter of her circle, she feels the terrible weight of a life half-lived. Her husband Clarence is kind, comfortable, and utterly, maddeningly dull. The gossip of her peers offers no nourishment. Even Billy, her stepdaughter, seems to belong to another world. Kathleen Thompson Norris, the most borrowed author in American libraries during her lifetime, crafts a quiet devastation in these pages - the slow suffocation of a woman told she should be grateful for a cage made of gold. This is no melodrama; it is the subtler tragedy of a woman who cannot name what is missing, only feel its absence. For readers who cherish Edith Wharton and wonder what happens to the unnamed heroines of those novels years later, this is their answer.