Nuttie grows up in a small town believing her mother is a widow, and discovers at sixteen that her father is alive, rich, and about to claim them both — which is worse than the widowhood. Yonge lived her whole life in one Hampshire village and taught Sunday school there for seventy-one years; this 1885 novel is her hardest look at what a husband's legal rights meant to a woman he had deserted. Fifty-six plates of painting, from Redgrave to Herkomer, gather the quiet English rooms, worn faces and patient water this story of a deserted wife moves among.
