To Love

Margaret Peterson's 1915 novel captures a moment when the old rules of love were crumbling and women had not yet learned the new ones. Joan Rutherford spends a summer afternoon in Hyde Park with Gilbert Stanning, a man whose intensity both thrills and unsettles them. They debate love and marriage like philosophers, but beneath their intellectual play lies a more dangerous question: can Joan trust her own desires, or has she simply mistaken hunger for love? Joan has carved out an independent life in London, and that independence feels hard-won and precious. As her relationship with Gilbert deepens, she faces the terrible possibility that passion and selfhood might be incompatible, that to love him fully might mean losing herself. The novel traces her agonizing navigation of what it meant to want something (or someone) fiercely in an era that had not yet decided whether women were allowed to want at all.