A widow has given her life to a son who is charming, weak and about to marry a woman she detests, and follows the pair to Europe to see it happen. Davis published Life in the Iron-Mills in 1861 and invented American realism in a single story; this late novel of 1897 is short, cold, and unillusioned about mother love, which almost nobody was writing about at all. Sixty plates of painting, from Mary Cassatt to Eastman Johnson, follow the novel's mothers and children through American rooms and shorelines.
