A Parisian girl of fifteen, adored and neglected, discovers her widowed father is to marry her mother's friend, and runs — into a convent, a career and a decade of finding out what she is worth. Bentzon was Marie-Thérèse Blanc, one of the most powerful critics in France, who introduced Mark Twain and Bret Harte to French readers in the Revue des Deux Mondes; her own fiction is unsentimental about girls, which was rare. Fifty-eight plates of girls at windows, at lessons and at play, from Renoir and Mary Cassatt among others, run through the book like a second portrait of Jacqueline.
