London and Rhodesia: two women who will not marry to order — one takes to journalism, one to the colony — and the men who cannot follow them. Page emigrated to Rhodesia with her husband and farmed there for twenty years, writing the novels that told Britain what the colony was like; she wrote settler life without the heroics, and the women in it work. Fifty-five plates of painting from 1818 to 1923, including Gwen John and William Orpen, show women in grey cloaks, mulberry dresses and quiet rooms, the private lives this novel of two women sets out to record.
