Under the Country Sky

Georgiana Warne is twenty-three and trapped. Not in a prison, but in a quiet country manse where her father's failing health keeps her from the lively world she tasted in college. Her friends have moved on to dances and careers and suitors, while Georgiana channels her considerable energy into nursing her father and resisting the quiet desperation threatening to swallow her. Then Mr. Jefferson arrives as a boarder, a man whose quiet intelligence hints that depth might be found even in the country. And when Georgiana invites her glamorous cousin Jeannette for a visit, she sets into motion a chain of social comparisons and romantic entanglements that will force her to decide what she truly wants: the security of duty, or the terrifying freedom of her own ambitions. Written in 1916, this is early twentieth-century women's fiction at its most perceptive: a story about the ache of invisible labor, the class distinctions that shape desire, and one woman's fight to be more than society's patient, self-sacrificing daughter.