Aurelia Delavie, the beauty of a poor half-pay major's household, is taken into a great lady's house and married, by an arrangement she does not understand, to a husband whose face she is not allowed to see. Charlotte Yonge built the story on the fable of Cupid and Psyche, which she explains in her preface, and dressed it in the manners of the eighteenth century with the same exactness she gave her own. Fifty-six plates, from Gainsborough to Munch, follow the story's theme of young women caught between courtship and marriage.
