The Open Question: A Tale of Two Temperaments

In the aftermath of the Civil War, a Southern family must learn to breathe in hostile air. The Ganos of Virginia, once secure in their place, find themselves transplanted to the rocky shores of New Plymouth, Massachusetts, where their very accent invites suspicion and their history marks them as foreigners in their own country. Mrs. Sarah Gano, a woman of formidable will, struggles to raise her delicate children, Ethan, John, and Valeria, amidst the ruins of the world they knew. But it is eldest son Ethan who faces the sharpest test: how to hold onto honor when the code that defined it has been burnt to ash, and how to build a future in a North that sees Southerners as relics of a disgraced age. Elizabeth Robins, writing with the psychological acuity that would later make her a champion of women's suffrage, traces the slow bleeding of identity in a nation determined to forget. The novel pulses with the particular anguish of those who must reinvent themselves not from choice but from catastrophe, and asks what remains of a person when everything that once gave them meaning has been dismantled.